Movie Project - Day 41: Toy Story

Hard to believe this movie was released a little over fifteen years ago, and it is just as good as the day I sat in the Village Tree Mall Theatre in St. Albert, Alberta. You don't forget this movie, but oddly I've forget when the first time was Erini saw it. My wife figures it was Fall 2008 that I opened up my collectors edition Ultimate Toy Box and put Toy Story into the DVD player for the first time. A week later my wife took it out because Erini wanted to watch nothing else, but my wife was very sick of watching it. Hard to believe you can get sick of Toy Story, but she did.

Like any kind of sickness though, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger, and my wife loves Toy Story enough that she'll let my daughter watch it now and again. Today was the first time I had seen it since 5 Nov 2010, when I did a Toy Story Marathon with some friends to celebrate the release of Toy Story 3. Erini watched the whole marathon too.

During the scene when Woody and Buzz enter Sid's room, and Woody is freaking out about the scene, Erini commented that Woody was scared. Then she really caught my attention when she started talking about Toy Story 3. She said something about Buzz being tied to a chair, and he was scared. I asked if she was scared, and she kept pointing out that Woody was scared, never affirming or denying that she harboured any kind of fear towards the movie.

It's been pointed out that my daughter has trouble sleeping whenever she watched the second sequel of today's movie, and so I haven't watched TS3 since November. I'm hoping that I'll be able to watch it with her sometime soon, and she'll be able to shed her fear. I don't know why, but she seems to do better watching movies with her daddy.

While this was Pixar's first feature film, it was not their first production. Luxo Jr. owns that spot, and the two films have something in common. When John Lasseter premiered Luxo Jr. at SIGGRAPH someone approached him. Lasseter was afraid that he was about to ask some sort of techincal question regarding the film such as the shading or light scatter algorythms used. Instead he was asked if the parent lamp was the mother or the father. With that question, Lasseter saw they had achieved their goal of showing that computer animation was another tool available to animators, but it was story that made it lasting.

This movie, and the other two in the series, have such rich environments there is always something else to find. Sometimes it's a matter of knowing the references to the inside jokes that makes it new, like the carpet on the upstairs landing at Sid's house. Trust me, if you know Lee Unkrich's favourite movie, it's hilarious. Even today, my wife pointed out that Woody's hat right's itself when he shakes his head after the bowling ball hits him. You can focus on details like that after the fourth or fifth viewing.

One day, Erini and I will watch this with director commentary. Hopefully. She might not have the patience for something like that, but it will probably be a few years yet before she'll appreciate extra features like that.

Until then, we'll just supply our own commentaries.