Toy Story 3
Blu-ray/DVD Combo | DVD
Directed by Lee Unkrich
Starring Tim Allen, Tom Hanks, Michael Keaton, Ned Beatty
Walt Disney Home Entertainment
Release Date: November 2, 2010

I’m a Pixar fanatic through and through and yet I’m not in love with the Toy Story franchise. My mind often wonders how that is possible. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly appreciate the series and the first movie, in particular, for its historical significance. I also feel the current crop of 3D animated films owe their existence to Woody, Buzz, Slinky Dog, and the rest, but I’ve always found the first two entries in the series to be of a different time in Pixar’s life. I find myself much more engaged by more recent outings like Wall-E and Up than I do from older films like A Bug’s Life and Toy Story.

That being said, I think Toy Story 3 just might be my favorite film in the franchise. I don’t know if it’s just because it’s the most recent and it’s fresh in my mind, but I had a lot of fun with this third part of the trilogy. The film benefits greatly from computer technology that is a decade ahead of the previous Toy Story films and looks amazing (especially on Blu-ray). This can be found in the level of sophistication in not only the toys and humans, but in the backgrounds and environments as well. The opening dream sequence really shows off what I feel like the filmmakers have been trying to show us since the first movie but were limited by the technology of the day.

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 2
Special Edition Blu-ray/DVD Combo
Directed by John Lasseter
Starring Tim Allen, Tom Hanks, Joan Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Don Rickles
Walt Disney Home Entertainment
Release Date: March 23, 2010

Toy Story 2 had a lot to live up to. The original Toy Story was an instant hit both critically and commercially. It’s success started PIxar down the path of awesomeness that would eventually lead to nine other formidable films that I still cherish. So the question is, how would they follow up such a massive hit? With more of the same, as it turns out.

Where the first film focused on Buzz Lightyear more and was really his story, the sequel gives a similar treatment for our favorite cowboy, Woody. Woody’s friend and owner Andy heads off to cowboy camp leaving his toys to their own devices. Things shift into high gear when an obsessive toy collector named Al McWhiggin (owner of Al’s Toy Barn) kidnaps Woody. At Al’s apartment, Woody discovers that he is a highly valued collectible from a 1950s TV show called Woody’s Roundup, and he meets the other prized toys from that show, Jessie the Cowgirl, Bullseye the Horse, and Stinky Pete the Prospector. Back at the scene of the crime, Buzz Lightyear and the other toys from Andy’s room — Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, Rex, and Hamm — spring into action to rescue their pal from winding up as a museum piece. The toys get into one predicament after another in their daring race to get Woody before Andy returns.

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 brand new clip has shown up online for the exciting upcoming trilogy-making Toy Story 3, complete with an introduction from director Lee Unkrich.

In the first full trailer for the movie, we saw Andy, now 18-years-old and heading off to college (and still voiced by original actor John Morris), holding Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) in his hands, deciding what to do with them and his other old toys. This was a favorite part of the trailer because we’ve all looked at old toys many years after we loved them so much and still felt that natural connection to them. In this clip, we get a lot more from this scene and how the movie is going to be set up when we finally see it on June 18, 2010.

This Toy Story 3 clip is set to air on ABC Family when they air The Incredibles on Christmas night at 8:30. Click on over to the other side to check it out right now!