Led by Woody, Andy's toys live happily in his room until Andy's birthday brings Buzz Lightyear onto the scene. Afraid of losing his place in Andy's heart, Woody plots against Buzz. But when circums...
The best animated movies take us into worlds we could never know otherwise. This is one of the countless things that makes Pixar movies so great: from “Toy Story”(1995) to “Coco”(2017), they’ve taken us to beautiful, unexplored worlds through both groundbreaking animation and immaculate storytelling. Let’s face it, if it’s any world we want to be taken to, it’s one in which toys come to life. “Toy Story” started it all for Pixar, of course, and it still holds up wonderfully even after 23 years.
The world of these living toys is made so real by all the little details: they have their own staff meetings that everyone attends with Monday-morning groans, their own little society, and even their own individual quirks. The movie goes to great lengths to establish that these toys are just like you and me — they get happy, sad, jealous, they love, they hate, and they are deathly afraid of being replaced by someone better. Pixar constructs every one of their characters so fully, that we end up empathizing with the protagonists so much; this completely involves us in their journeys, and eventually teaches us the same lessons they learn. Genius.
Good movies make the actions of the characters follow naturally from their personality traits, and Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz (Tim Allen)are such complete characters that everything they do follows seamlessly from their personalities; for example, it’s not at all a far-fetched plot-starter when Woody (literally) overthrows Buzz because we know that Woody has a very real and powerful jealousy for Andy; in the same way, Buzz’s brief mental breakdown makes perfect sense since we know how proudly he sticks to his bizarre Space Ranger act. This all makes for a very fluid plot, but also, in both cases, the audience can closely relate: we’ve all felt insecure like Woody, and we’ve all had a shattering encounter with reality like Buzz.
While this is first and foremost an animated movie, it’s definitely not the animation that holds it up so well after two decades (the rendering of humans is slightly disturbing, to say the least), but it’s reliving all the memorable moments that makes this — and all Pixar movies — worth watching over and over again; moments like when the toys first come to life, when Woody first meets Buzz, when they argue at the gas station and take a trip to Pizza Planet, when Woody rescues Buzz from the rocket, and when Buzz actually flies — seriously, the entire movie is just a string of iconic moments.
Every Pixar movie has one central theme that it works around; usually it’s about a deeper, important part of life: in “The Incredibles” it’s family, “Wall-E” is about love, I like to think “Up” is about selflessness, and the entire “Toy Story” saga explores friendship. This first installment is perfect because it shows how Woody lowers his giant wall of ego to finally care about others more than himself, the first step to true friendship. If Woody had never relented, the next two movies would have been really different.
Right from their first movie, Pixar established that their stories would not just be for children; in fact, it’s the adults that tend to enjoy watching and rewatching these movies more because they can fully grasp how clever every story is. I find it fascinating how the most famous movie about toys didn’t actually cause a massive, long-term demand for these specific toys. Pixar wasn’t about selling merchandise to kids, it was about making a good movie that keeps getting better as its audience gets older, and we are all beyond grateful it has not abandoned this same mission today.
