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movie review - Toy Story

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

This is a story about a room full of toys. They belong to a certain boy, and they have a little village-like setting, interacting and carrying on like normal people when alone, and then lying about pretending to be inanimate objects when the boy is present. The story begins when the boy's favorite toy - a sheriff from a fifties television show - finds himself being upstaged in the boy's affections by a spaceman toy. The ensuing tension leads to a series of adventures well beyond the boy's room and as the two rivals bond and they struggle with the spaceman's delusion that he is a real spaceman, they deal with threats like the cruel pre-teen next door who likes to destroy toys.

This could be the finest children's movie ever made. The level of animation is just right - realistic and cartoonish at once. The humans are ever so slightly off-putting in a weird way, but they're not the stars of the show. It's the simpler toys that are the focus and this works for them. The entire thing about the spaceman thinking he's real seems fairly key to the story but it introduces some significant plot problems - why doesn't the spaceman introduce himself to the boy, if he thinks he's real. Why does he pretend to be inanimate? What sort of life form does he think the humans are, that are twenty to fifty times his size. But no matter, there's enough here that works, and we can set aside why in that light.

Strongly recommended.