Toy Story
4-Disc Blu-ray 3D
DIRECTED BY: John Lasseter
WRITTEN BY: Andrew Stanton, Joss Whedon, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow
STARRING: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, John Morris, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Annie Potts, R. Lee Ermey, Laurie Metcalf
Disney*Pixar
RELEASE DATE: November 1, 2011

It feels like only yesterday that Toy Story first came out and changed the world of movies as we know them. A fully-animated feature film? Absolutely unheard of! And it almost never happened, with numerous issues putting to the test the young Pixar Animation team trying to make it. But it did happen, eventually, and computer animated movies have become a staple of modern day cinema.

The movie, for those who have somehow never seen it, follows a young boy’s collection of toys led by the once-favorite, a cowboy named Woody (Tom Hanks), who’s trying to come to terms with the boy’s impressive new favorite toy, the highly sought after Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) action figure.

Toy Story 3 – ***1/2
Directed by Lee Unkrich
Starring Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty
Release date: June 18, 2010

It is wonderful to capture memories. We all do it one way or another. Video recorders are typically used for it, be it either for capturing celebrations, parties, talent shows, sporting events, or even sorrowful ones that cause us to be emotionally saddened. Years go by when we return to them again finding bliss and a moment out of time that is impossible to explain; an unfathomable remembrance of things past.

Toy Story 3 begins magnificently with old videos of Andy playing with his toys — a time when he kept reality at bay and possessed nothing but joy, caring very little from what was transpiring outside of his fantasy world abundantly full of train robberies and spacemen saving the day from evil. We all have to move on, and Toy Story 3 finds grievance in this stark realization and employs it throughout the movie within characters like Andy who is now going away to college, his mother struggling to deal with that, and his entire chest of toys who are facing being either shipped to the attic, donated to Sunnyside daycare, or thrown in the trash because Andy has grown up.

Toy Story
Two Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo
Directed by John Lasseter
Starring Tim Allen, Tom Hanks, Annie Potts, John Ratzenberger, Don Rickles
Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment
Release Date: March 23, 2010

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a huge Pixar fanatic, drooling over their annual releases at my local cinema like a kid in a candy shop. They continually amaze me with their ability to put out what I think are the best films released every year. For this reason, Toy Story holds a special place in my Pixar-loving heart as “˜the one that started it all.’

The film is significant for a couple reasons. It was the first full-length CGI feature (breaking new ground for the quality of computer-generated animation in general). It was also the movie that all other Pixar releases built upon and without the success of the first Toy Story, things might have gone very different for Pixar and the full-length CG animated films we see today that are so abundant. On a sadder note, you can probably trace the death of 2D hand-drawn animation back to the success of Toy Story.

The film astounds on a number of levels. It astounds on a technical level — the movie occupied the attention of a bank of 300 powerful Sun microprocessors, the fastest models around (in 1995), which took about 800,000 hours of computing time to achieve this and other scenes — at 2 to 15 hours per frame. Each frame required as much as 300 MBs of information! To put you in the mindset of early to mid 90’s computing, this was a time of one-gigabyte hard drives, which would give you about three frames, or an eighth of a second of screen time.

A Bug’s Life
Blu-ray Edition
Directed by John Lasseter & Andrew Stanton
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Dave Foley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Denis Leary, Madeline Kahn, Phyllis Diller, John Ratzenberger
Walt Disney Home Entertainment
Release Date: May 19, 2009

On November 25, 1998, Walt Disney Pictures and the budding Pixar Animation Studio put out their second feature-length computer-animated motion picture after the classic Toy Story, and this movie was called A Bug’s Life. When it came out, the movie cost only $60 million to make, and pulled in over $350 million at the in box office, which was an amazing feat, seconded only by Toy Story‘s $30 million budget and over $350 million box office take. Even with these impressive numbers, Pixar still fought through many troubled times before really taking off and never looking back.

Since then, eight more Pixar movies have been released, and as we all know, they have all been brilliant. Pixar is now majorly considered to be completely fail-proof — and all of this started with the first couple of Toy Story movies and A Bug’s Life.

A Bug’s Life tells the story of a colony of ants who have collected a pile of food in order to pay off a bigger, more-dangerous group of grasshoppers lead by Hopper (Kevin Spacey) who demand payment from the little ants. The colony’s wannabe inventor Flik (Dave Foley), however, uses his latest invention to disastrously lose the entire pile of food into the river, which in-turn angers the grasshoppers, who in-turn demand another pile of food double the size of the initial rations. This would leave the ants without any food at all for themselves for the winter, so they banish Flik for his actions. Eventually, he convinces the Queen (Phyllis Diller) and the Princess (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) to allow him to venture off to Bug City and find the biggest, baddest group of bugs to stand up to the grasshoppers and get rid of them forever. Unfortunately, the bugs he finds may not be quite what they hoped for.

IESB spoke to Jodi Benson — who voiced Ariel in The Little Mermaid and also did the voice for Tour Guide Barbie in Toy Story 2 — about Toy Story 3.

Benson confirmed that Mr. Michael Keaton himself will be joining the cast as a Ken doll to her Barbie.

Keaton played the role of Batman/Bruce Wayne in Tim Burton’s 1989 feature Batman and its 1992 sequel Batman Returns, as well as the title role in Burton’s Beetlejuice. In recent years, the actor starred in the horror film White Noise and played Lindsey Lohan’s father in Disney’s Herbie: Fully Loaded. He also voiced Chick in Disney’s Cars.

Original cast returning includes Tom Hanks and Tim Allen as the required Buzz and Woody, along with Wallace Shawn as Rex, John Ratzenberger as Hamm, Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head, Estelle Harris as Mrs. Potato Head, and Joan Cusack as Jessie.