The film certainly stands as pure entertainment. The movie had to deliver, and that’s what it did.Ĭonsidering the vast economic forces at work, it’s amazing that Toy Story 3 works as well as it does. Really, though, Toy Story 3 cost Disney something more like $7.6 billion to make, due to the purchase of Pixar. The film ended up with a budget of $200 million, an astronomical pricetag for an animated movie. All the living members of the Toy Story cast returned. Screenwriter Michael Arndt was a relative newcomer to Pixar, but he’d just won an Oscar for writing Little Miss Sunshine, his first script. Lee Unkrich, a longtime Pixar insider who’d been co-director of Toy Story 2, signed on to direct. Toy Story 3 was Pixar’s first feature as a fully entrenched part of the Disney empire. (When Disney bought Marvel and Lucasfilm, the other two splashy acquisitions of the early Iger era, those two moves cost about $4 billion each, which means Disney paid nearly as much for Pixar as it did for Marvel and Star Wars combined.)Īll those moving parts meant that America went more than a decade between Toy Story sequels. Ultimately, Disney paid $7.6 billion to buy Pixar outright. Iger, now the most powerful man in Hollywood, immediately ditched all those Circle 7 plans and instead went to work mending the bridges between Disney and Pixar. Partly because of fan and investor backlash over those Circle 7 plans, Disney pushed Eisner out and replaced him with Bob Iger. (That script reportedly involved Buzz Lightyear getting recalled and shipped to a factory in Taiwan and the other toys going to rescue him. Circle 7 had a whole staff of animators and writers, and it had a Toy Story 3 script ready to go. Eisner responded by founding a whole new Disney animation studio, called Circle 7, which would be devoted entirely to making sequels to those original Pixar movies. Eisner and Jobs came to hate one another, and when Pixar finished up its original contract with Disney, the animation studio announced plans to go fully independent. 3 at the 1999 box office, behind only The Phantom Menace and The Sixth Sense.ĭisney boss Michael Eisner rewarded Pixar by letting the company know that the terms of their deal didn’t include sequels, that they still owed Disney more movies. Toy Story 2 turned out, if anything, even better than its predecessor, and it was also a massive hit-No. Toy Story 2 was originally planned as a low-budget straight-to-video release, but when Disney deemed the sequel promising enough for a theatrical run, the Pixar braintrust went into brand-protection overdrive, with writers and animators working around the clock to turn it into something special. Under the original terms of the distribution deal between the companies, Pixar would make the movies, and Disney would own the characters and sequel rights for those first five films. Disney had responded to that success by milking Pixar for whatever the company was worth. Pixar, an animation studio that had already been through a long and chaotic gestation period, had used Disney’s money to test the idea that computer animation could tell a complete story, and the experiment had succeeded wildly. Fifteen years earlier, the original Toy Story had been a delightful cinematic Hail Mary. It took a whole lot of corporate machinations before Toy Story 3 could fuck around with people’s feelings on that level. We’d all be lucky to go out like that, and the beauty of the moment allows you to forget, for just a second, that you are watching a lucrative global children’s-entertainment franchise and not a bleak European art film. They wordlessly accept what’s about to happen, holding plastic hands and giving one another whatever comfort they can offer. In the film’s climactic scene, the one where the toys are all sliding downward toward doom, these inexplicable sentient beings all exhibit absolute dignity and absolute love. Toy Story 3 won’t let you ponder those questions because it’s too busy power-bombing your inner child through a flaming table. Are those atoms then sentenced to a hell of eternal frustration? For instance: Can a toy die? What does it mean to die if you don’t have any biological functions in the first place? When your detached body parts can operate independently of one another, is death itself merely a construct? Will all your immolated atoms go on to lives of their own? And will those atoms live out their lives hoping that children will play with them? Children can’t play with atoms. If you start thinking too hard, you might start asking difficult questions. Toy Story 3, like so many Pixar films, preys on your emotions.
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