Toy Story 1995

[8.2/10] You don’t have to look hard at Toy Story to find a metaphor for the state of animation in the 1990s. Woody the drawstring cowboy, beloved by his owner, represents the old hand-drawn style, delighting audiences for decades and full of home-spun charm. Buzz, the flashy and gimmick-filled spaceman, represents the budding advent of computer animation, threatening to displace the old favorite in favor of what’s shiny and new. It’s a future that the movie itself represents.

Watching the film, you can understand the anxiety and trepidation from lovers of traditional animation. Even twenty-five years later, Toy Story looks remarkably good for a computer-animated movie released at a time when the Internet was just reaching the general public. There was a novelty to the movie as the first feature-length film animated with ones and zeroes rather than ink and paint and in their first at bat, Pixar immediately showed what they could do.

Granted, some of that stems from the smart choice to follow in their shorts’ footsteps and stick with toys as the main characters. If you look at the humans, it’s not hard to discern that there was still a ways to go in terms of realistic figures. But if CGI toys look a little plasticky? No big deal! They’re supposed to!

More impressively, Toy Story’s characters are extraordinarily expressive. With his rag doll body, Woody can move with a gangly grace and nicely toe the line between cartoon character and real life object. When Buzz has lost his marbles or Woody is exasperatedly trying to convince his partner-in-crime that he’s a toy or the two of them are rocketing to their owner, their facial expressions are memorable and full of range. Even the way the toys drop and collapse when a human comes in range has a memorable sense of motion to it. The look and the physics of all of this isn’t exactly real, but it’s real enough, making you believe that walking, talking toys are possible, if only for an hour and change.

And yet, what stands out in the film isn’t just its visual approach, which has been far surpassed and become almost standard in the modern era; it’s the story and characters. Woody and Buzz rightfully took their place in the Disney pantheon as some of the studio’s most memorable and iconic characters, and for good reason. For one thing, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen clearly give it their all. The former uses his everyman charm to find the heart in a good toy who lets his anxieties bring out the worst in him after he’s upstaged, and the latter channels William Shatner and adds some unassuming depth to the spaceman brought to earth.

Each of the two leads has a wonderfully-realized, interconnected arc. Woody is Andy’s favorite toy, a place of privilege that’s jeopardized when this fancy new space ranger comes to town. Suddenly, Woody’s gone from reassuring all of the less-cherished toys that there’s a spot for all of them in Andy’s heart and no one’s being replace, to resenting the johnny-come-lately who's unseated him in the plaything pecking order for both their fellow toys and for Andy. An effort to sideline his competition spirals out of control and is taken for attempted murder, and the once proud leader and hero to the fellow toys is kicked out and ostracized by his former believers.

It’s naturally a little exaggerated, but rooted in something relatable. Buzz doesn’t believe he’s a toy, and despite not knowing or cherishing the sterling place he occupies in Andy’s heart, he’s managed to dislodge Woody from it. The frustration at someone who’s bested you without really knowing or trying is palpable, and it makes Woody relatable in his struggle, even when he does some regrettable things.

For his part, Buzz has to grapple with the epiphany that he is, in fact, a toy and not an academy space ranger like he believed all this time. The realization that he cannot fly, that he’s not a vaunted intergalactic hero, that he is, as Woody puts it, “a child’s plaything” understandably drains the effortlessly confident Mr. Lightyear (née Nesbitt) of his self-esteem and purpose in life, leaving him loopy and eventually distraught.

And yet, as so often happens in these films, the two are forced to work together through all of this and eventually find their way to the other side together. The film does a good job of setting the stakes, not just in terms of the thread of Sid, the “psycho” kid from next door who likes to dissect and blow up toys, but also in terms of Andy and his family’s moving day, which has the potential to leave the two of them lost forever when the two end up stranded. It’s a set up for plenty of hijinks and adventure, as well as growth.

Frankly, one of the most impressive things about Toy Story is that it’s just set piece after set piece, each more impressive than the last. The army men’s inspection of Andy’s birthday party, the race to get to Pizza Planet, the escapade in the claw game, and the various schemes and races against time once they arrive at Sid’s are all expertly crafted. The animators aren’t afraid to get a little scary, with Sid’s Frankensteined toys striking horror notes and the attacks from Sid’s dog, Scud, calling to mind Jurassic Park.

Still, eventually the film casts those woebegotten toys as allies, who fix fellow toys after Sid’s “experiments” rather than cannibalizing them. With their help, Woody and Buzz are able to not only escape their torturer’s clutches, but scare him off from abusing his toys ever again. From there, the film turns to a heart-pumping race against ties, full of excitement, twists, and visual excellence as the duo use every trick in the book to get back to their beloved Andy.

But it takes them working together. Through all of these adventures, Woody realizes that Buzz isn’t a rival, but a friend, one who helps Woody despite what he did to Buzz, even after everyone else turned on him for it. And Woody helps Buzz see the joy and glory of being a toy, how even if it’s not quite being a space ranger, bringing joy to a child’s life and basking in that love can be no less fulfilling. It takes both of them working together to succeed here, and in the end, Woody turns his resentment into friendship; Buzz sheds his disappointment and takes flight, and both of them find their way back to the boy they love, with a closing moment that suggests there’s room for both of them.

Nevertheless, that comes with a mildly grim realization that lingers on a rewatch of Toy Story a quarter century later. Despite that hint at coexistence, Disney doesn’t make traditionally animated feature films anymore. The Pixar crew all but took over the studio’s film animation department. If you take the old vs. new metaphor seriously (and, in fairness, the movie works just fine without it), then the new won and, just as Woody feared, eventually displaced the old.

Or maybe it didn’t, at least not completely. While traditional animation has been mostly relegated to television in the West (and even there, much of it is digital and/or flash animation), computer-animated films have continued to make great leaps in style and beauty in the twenty-five years since Toy Story debuted. Beyond the film’s own sequels, releases like Inside Out, Moana, Into the Spider-Verse, and Klaus have shown that there can be no less artistry, no fewer wondrous worlds created, no less majesty and splendor crafted with the click of a mouse than with the stroke of a pen.

More to the point, Toy Story itself demonstrated that even if the package changed, the soul could remain the same. Even before it was fully enveloped by The Mouse, Pixar picked up the baton from the Disney Renaissance, releasing some of the most imaginative, entertaining, and heartening animated films in history, at a time when Walt’s former studio was near-moribund creatively. Computer animation won out over the long haul, but Toy Story heralded the way that even if cel animation and CGI couldn’t necessarily coexist on the big screen, the charm and heart and spirit of the one could still live on with, and through, the other.

While Pixar’s Toy Story certainly made game-changing technological achievements as the world’s first wholly computer-animated feature film, it never detracted from its thematically rich narrative that is so brilliantly attuned to the traumatic existential crises we humans experience. The impact of this intimate connection with the viewer is further enhanced by the similarity of its two main characters’ struggles. Being his owner Andy’s favorite toy, Sheriff Woody has enjoyed the luxuries of constant playtime and the role of authority figure among his plastic brethren, developing a fierce loyalty for Andy alongside a concerning selfishness, so when he discovers Andy’s new birthday present, a high-tech action figure named Buzz Lightyear, he responds to this possible replacement with a cutthroat hostility in the hopes of avoiding the bottom of the toychest, directly contradicting his posse’s philosophy of simply “being there for Andy”. But through a series of trials and tribulations, Woody comes to reach an emotional synthesis with Buzz after an understanding of his own struggles: this new toy never intended to be a threat; he was simply fulfilling Andy’s needs, yet was also facing an inner crisis himself, upon realizing he actually was a toy, not the elite Saturday-morning cartoon space ranger he’s modeled after. Catharsis is finally reached not only when Woody regains respect among his friends, but when he inspires and reminds Buzz of his endless worth as the most revered figure in his young owner’s life. While Toy Story certainly works as a witty buddy-comedy-adventure, its superficial entertainment all plays second fiddle to these toys’ sophisticated psyches struggling to find common ground, and it boasts analogous parallels with those facing midlife crises, a child fearing a deficit of love and attention when a newborn sibling comes around, as well as those taking the next step from childhood bliss to the strenuous real world.