“Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. ..(points if you get the reference)
Hey howdy hey everybody (however many body’s there may be tonight)! We’ve finally reached the kick off day for Expletive Dleted! As you prolly know, I’ve been reviewing movies on
I’d originally intended to kick off the project/experiment/time-killer with a movie I haven’t seen before. Buuuut tonight’s the last night of the Toy Story 3-D double feature special engagement thing, and I prolly wont get to see any of the other AFI movies on the big screen anytime soon. So I figured it was apropos enough.
I love Toy Story. It’s still easily my favorite Pixar movie. I know I did see it in the theater back in the day. I can’t remember the exact experience, but I do remember what a big deal it was that it was a computer animated movie. I’d grown up watching classic Disney animated films (hey I was a prime target for the second golden age of Disney in the early 90’s) and the idea of computer animated just boggled my mind. Little did I know that within two years I’d be sick of the whole computer animated fad and I’d be aching for a classic hand drawn animated feature (thankfully we now got Princess and the Frog looming on the horizon). Anyways, Im guessing that animation breakthrough is the reason why Toy Story made it onto the AFI list.
I was sitting in the front row (well the front row of the back section) and as soon as it started, I instantly became five years old again, or actually I guess I was prolly about 10 when I first saw it. I’d just forgotten how incredible this movie is. The dialogue is so clever and the concept is brilliant. The animation is gorgeous and I love their attention to detail. There were so many subtle jokes here and there (such as the For Sale sign on Andy’s house from Virtual Realty) that I’d never noticed before.
And I just loved listening to Tom Hanks’ voice. Its so easy for actors to just phone in a vocal performance, but Hanks really gives it his all. He really makes an animated toy character real and believable.
Im not convinced that the 3D-ness really added that much to the overall experience. It was exciting for the first five or ten minutes, then I sorta didnt notice it anymore. By the third hour of the evening, it was actually starting to get a bit headachingly irritating.
I did kinda lose a lot of the excitement by the time we got to the second half of the double feature. Toy Story 2 just doesnt measure up to its predecessor. And by this point, it was already getting kinda late. But seeing them back to back was interesting because again there were some many little subtleties that I wouldnt have picked up otherwise.
So it was a wonderful start to what’s gonna be an interesting movie season for me. Let’s just hope they’re all this fun!”