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.

Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Entertainment have released the second official trailer for next Summer’s highly-anticipated Toy Story 3.

The trailer is definitely a different direction from the first trailer that we saw released. In that one, it was mainly about Andy going off to college and the toys being dumped off in a day care facility. This time around, you’re returned to the day care, but you get to meet some of the new toys that we’ve heard about but not seen, like the Ken doll voiced by Michael Keaton, the mysterious toy that appeared in Pixar’s last film, Up, and Timothy Dalton‘s Mr. Pricklepants.

Continue on down to the bottom to read a synopsis and watch this brand new Toy Story 3 trailer for yourself. And do not forget, the movie will be released in only 4 short months on June 18, 2010.

A new video has been released by Walt Disney for Toy Story 3. It originally aired on The Disney Channel as a micro featurette TV spot, but it is now online for all to see. The video is basically just the trailer that we’ve seen already, but it has an introduction from director Lee Unkrich, who discusses the film briefly and makes a quick reference to the brand new characters that we’ll see. This is where we get to meet Mr. Pricklepants! The character pops up for a moment, says a quick line, and is then gone, but it’s still cool to see one of the new additions; and hey, news is deathly slow lately.

Mr. Pricklepants is a poofy little hedgehog who wears a pretty sweet little lederhosen get-up. He also has a prim and proper voice to accompany the look — a voice that you wouldn’t expect just looking at the new toy, that’s for true. Pricklepants gets this distinguished gentleman accent from none other than Timothy Dalton, who is best known for his stint as 007 James Bond as well as for his turn as a villain in Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz.

Click on over to the other side to check out the new video and meet Mr. Pricklepants (that is pretty fun to say) for yourself!

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!