Fantasia 2000 (Hendel Butoy & Don Hahn, 1999)
I could really could do without the live-action interludes, though I suspect I felt the same way after watching the 1940 film. I would much rather have had things hosted by Mickey, as the Sorceror's Apprentice, drawn in the original style, and let that be the link between the films, rather than recycling that segment. The new film ends on its best note, with the Stravinsky-inspired
The Firebird being a worthy successor to
Night on Bald Mountain /
Ave Maria.
The Steadfast Tin Soldier (Shostakovich) is the other real treat. The frozen, nonplussed look on the toy soldier's face every time he's in peril proves delightful time and time again; and the evilness and destruction of the jack-in-the-box surprised and appealed to me with its dark maturity.
Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven with the whales) plays better in my head than it did live, due to the computer-generated imagery looking a bit primitive. A few of the musical choices struck me as somewhat uninspired, but
Fantasia 2000 still managed to surpass my wary expectations.
Grade: B-
The Iron Giant (Brad Bird, 1999)
I was a bit nervous to revisit
The Iron Giant, but it's lost none of its appeal. Every shot of the giant against the landscape is magic, especially at the treetops. The animators do an especially impressive job imbuing him with character, despite his mostly being just a tower of metal. The subtle ways in which they draw a personality and even a soul out of that metal is a true highlight of the film. I find the atmosphere of the movie to be super appealing, like hot chocolate on a winter's day. The filmmakers' nostalgia for the period setting is irresistible. The backgrounds are all really nice, and the voice acting is top-notch. There are of course things I don't especially like (many of them involving Kent Mansley), but those seemingly obligatory moments, the script is great about taking its medicine and moving on as quickly as possible. The result is easily my favorite animated film of 1999.
Grade: B+
Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter, 1999)
It seemed a bad sign early on when a non-toy (Buster) emerged as my favorite character, but I still had a pleasant time with this sequel. As dogs go, Slink is pretty great is his own right, and a great example of what these films do best: animating the inanimate in the most joyous ways and rooting the solutions to the story's conflicts in the characters' innate abilities and characteristics. (Apparently, I said almost the exact same thing in
my review of the first
Toy Story.) But when the film goes broad — and most of the denouement is pretty broad — it's extra disappointing, because the specificity of the other moments is so good.
The toys working together to drive a car is handled much better than the parallel scene in
Finding Dory, but it's still not an ideal solution to the problem of trying to follow Al, not in the context of this world and everything that's preceded that moment. In fact, the entire third act seems to anticipate what Charlie Kaufman does in his script for
Adaptation.
Toy Story 3 opens with an outlandish Buzz Lightyear adventure where peril piles upon peril in silly fashion, with nods towards old movie serials, video games, and the way children play with toys, their narrative unfettered by rules. By the third act, the film takes seriously what it playfully mocks in that opening, subjecting our characters from a series of false climaxes that are a hair's breadth away from being labeled arbitrary. It never falls to the level of being bad, but it doesn't necessarily excite me either.
Emotionally, my investment is the story peaked around the time of "When She Loved Me" and the serious and affecting themes of love and abandonment and loyalty and the risk/reward possibilities of any relationship ... but for me all that's thrown away when Woody decides to stay with the Roundup Gang. Even though he's kind of a jealous dick for much of the first film, I just can't accept the ease with which he forsakes not just Andy but also all of Andy's other toys, who are supposed to be Woody's friends and, in some respects, his charges. Your mileage may vary though, as 1SO's marathon
attests.
Tom Hanks' voice work is no help in making me believe Woody's decision, partly because I almost never hear "Woody", just "Tom Hanks." Even without that metacinematic awareness, I found more than a few of his line readings to be particularly poor. The
Bosom Buddies star gets out-acted by the
Home Improvement star here, and that's just weird to me. And I hate the type-casting of Wayne Knight, playing another immorally greedy character in another T Rex movie.
Toy Story 3 remains my favorite of the
Toy Story films, even though I'd forgotten how much Lotso's character is in some ways an uninspired recycling of Stinky Pete's.
Grade: B
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