Pixar Playlist #3 - Toy Story 2

Ladies and Gentlemen, whether you like it or not, the Pixar Playlist

Well, it didn’t take long to get to the first sequel but here we are with Toy Story 2. The success of Toy Story really sparked something, and because it’s Disney and around this point in their history, if a movie made any money, it got a direct-to-DVD sequel.

The deal with Disney was at this point revised to 5 movies in 5 original franchises, so Toy Story 2 wouldn’t count towards it. Production for this film was not easy, with tight deadlines and a sudden rush for it to be theatre quality as it was changed to get a theatrical release, not to mention them nearly deleting 90% of their assets and staff members working to the point of actually getting wrist problems did put a dampener of things.

Released in 1999, the film made a respectable $497m on it’s $90m budget and is one of those rare films with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so is it worth all that praise?

Well, yes and no, but I’ll get to that.

Andy accidentally damages Woody, and is soon written out for most of the runtime. Woody makes a rescue attempt for a toy in a yard sale and gets the attention of a collector named Al, now it’s up to Buzz Lightyear and the gang to rescue him.

In captivity, Woody finds out more about himself and his origins. He was a part of a puppet based TV show and meets toys of his co-stars, Jessie, Bullseye and Stinky Pete. And with a name like Stinky Pete you just know he’s most upstanding of citizens, yeah he’s the toy bad guy in this film. He’s not that interesting, but at least he’s not the other antagonist

I really don’t like Al. He’s a sad, lonely loser but the film never really wants to explore that, they just use it for the occasional joke. I suppose it’s a bit much to expect depth in humans in this movie about toys but it bothered me that combined they’re still less interesting than Sid from the first movie.

Andy continues to be a non-presence, which makes the desire to go back to him almost meaningless to me.

The film does have some upgrades, the animation is better than the first movie, it doesn’t have as many annoying characters and Buzz and Woody don’t spend most of the movie arguing, unfortunately that’s partly because they spend most of the movie apart, that’s unfortunate if you ask me.

I like that they expand a little on the world, giving more backstory and there is a couple of nice gags linked to it, particularly with the other Buzz Lightyear. Unfortunately, his part of the story was basically an unfunny Star Wars parody, it was good while it lasted. I do like our Buzz being clever and creative with his ideas, something we get a lot of in this movie.

Despite getting more screen-time, the other toys definitely don’t get any more development than they did in the first movie. The focus is pretty squarely on Woody this time around. He deals with a conflict (introduced through an OK song number) that Andy might move on and leave him behind, which was explored in the last movie (in fact the more I think about it, a lot of this plot bears similarity to the last one) and will again be explored in the next one. But rather than Buzz acting as a replacement, the conflict this time is realised through Jessie, someone who had already been through it, making the stakes feel more real and making both sides more justifiable.

In truth, I found this movie entertaining but nothing about it blew me away or gave me much of an emotional reaction at all. To step up, that’s what a Toy Story movie would need to do.

#1 Toy Story 2

#2 Toy Story

#3 A Bug’s Life