6. The Toy Story Trilogy (1995 – 2010)
Toy Story is a 1995 American computer-animated buddy comedy adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The directorial debut of John Lasseter, Toy Story was the first feature-length computer-animated film and the first theatrical film produced by Pixar. Taking place in a world where anthropomorphic toys pretend to be lifeless whenever humans are present, the film’s plot focuses on the relationship between Woody, a pullstring cowboy doll (voiced by Tom Hanks), and Buzz Lightyear, an astronaut action figure (voiced by Tim Allen), as they evolve from rivals competing for the affections of Andy, their owner, to friends who work together to be reunited with Andy as his family prepares to move to a new home. The screenplay was written by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, and Alec Sokolow, based on a story by Lasseter, Pete Docter, Stanton and Joe Ranft. The film features music by Randy Newman, and its executive producers were Steve Jobs and Edwin Catmull.
Pixar, which produced short animated films to promote their computers, was approached by Disney to produce a computer-animated feature after the success of their short film Tin Toy (1988), which is told from a small toy’s perspective. Lasseter, Stanton, and Docter wrote early story treatments which were thrown out by Disney, who pushed for a more edgy film. After disastrous story reels, production was halted and the script was re-written, better reflecting the tone and theme Pixar desired: that “toys deeply want children to play with them, and that this desire drives their hopes, fears, and actions.” The studio, then consisting of a relatively small number of employees, produced the film under minor financial constraints.
Released in theaters on November 22, 1995, Toy Story was the highest-grossing film on its opening weekend and earned over $373 million worldwide. The film was widely acclaimed by critics, who praised the animation’s technical innovation, the wit and thematic sophistication of the screenplay, and the performances of Hanks and Allen. It is now considered by many critics to be one of the best animated films ever made. The film received three Academy Award nominations, including Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song for “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”, as well as winning a Special Achievement Academy Award. It was inducted into the National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” in 2005, its first year of eligibility.
In addition to home media releases and theatrical re-releases, Toy Story-inspired material has run the gamut from toys, video games, theme park attractions, spin-offs, merchandise, and two sequels—Toy Story 2 (1999) and Toy Story 3 (2010)—both of which also garnered massive commercial success and critical acclaim, with a third sequel, Toy Story 4, slated for a 2019 release.
The most groundbreaking animated film of its’ time, showing that you can make great movies with computer animation and have it still hold up to this day.
The story itself is very pedestrian, we’ve seen this story done over and over again, it’s your typical buddy comedy storyline but they take advantages to make it work and give it a new edge to it that wasn’t there before.
It also helps that both Tom Hanks & Tim Allen work off each other so well as Woody & Buzz Lightyear and there’s also a strong cast including Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Jim Varney, Annie Potts, R. Lee Ermey, and Laurie Metcalf.
Toy Story is such a beloved movie, great animation, a great cast, great story, great characters, it just is a great classic animated movie and the beginning of Pixar’s stretch of really solid movies.
Toy Story 2 is a 1999 American computer-animated comedy adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Directed by John Lasseter and co-directed by Lee Unkrich and Ash Brannon, it is the sequel to the 1995 film Toy Story.
In the film, Woody is stolen by a toy collector, prompting Buzz Lightyear and his friends to vow to rescue him, but Woody is then tempted by the idea of immortality in a museum. Many of the original characters and voices from Toy Story return for this sequel, and several new characters—including Jessie (voiced by Joan Cusack), Barbie (voiced by Jodi Benson), Stinky Pete (voiced by Kelsey Grammer) and Mrs. Potato Head (voiced by Estelle Harris)—are introduced. It was the last Toy Story film that starred Annie Potts as Bo Peep and Jim Varney as Slinky Dog before his death in 2000.
Disney initially envisioned the film as a direct-to-video sequel. Toy Story 2 began production in a building separated from Pixar, on a small scale, as most of the main Pixar staff were busy working on A Bug’s Life (1998). When story reels proved promising, Disney upgraded the film to theatrical release, but Pixar was unhappy with the film’s quality. Lasseter and the story team redeveloped the entire plot in one weekend. Although most Pixar features take years to develop, the established release date could not be moved and the production schedule for Toy Story 2 was compressed into nine months.
Despite production struggles, Toy Story 2 opened in November 1999 to wildly successful box office numbers, eventually grossing over $497 million, and received universal acclaim from critics. Toy Story 2 has been considered by critics to be one of few sequel films to outshine the original, and it continues to be featured frequently on lists of the greatest animated films ever made. The film has seen multiple home media releases and a theatrical 3-D re-release in 2009, 10 years after its initial release. Toy Story 3 was released in 2010, which was also critically and commercially successful.
A hard thing to top something as great as the first Toy Story and when you take into consideration that Pixar had half of the original version of this movie that was already finished canned and had to restart all over within a year of the film’s release, the fact that they were still able to make one of the best sequels ever is an impressive feat for a studio that was only making computer animated films for four years to that point.
Toy Story 3 is a 2010 American 3D computer-animated comedy-drama film, the third installment in the Toy Story series, and the sequel to Toy Story 2 (1999). It was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It was directed by Lee Unkrich, the editor of Toy Story (1995) and co-director of Toy Story 2, written by Michael Arndt, while Unkrich wrote the story along with John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton, respectively director and co-writer of the first two films. The film was released in theaters June 18, 2010, and played worldwide from June through October in the Disney Digital 3-D, RealD, and IMAX 3D formats. Toy Story 3 was the first film to be released theatrically with Dolby Surround 7.1 sound.
The plot focuses on the toys Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and their friends dealing with an uncertain future as their owner, Andy, prepares to leave for college. The film features an ensemble voice cast with Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Estelle Harris, Jodi Benson, and John Morris reprising their roles from the previous films, and Ned Beatty, Michael Keaton, Whoopi Goldberg, Blake Clark (replacing Jim Varney), Timothy Dalton, Kristen Schaal, Bonnie Hunt, and Jeff Garlin joining the returning cast.
Like its predecessors, Toy Story 3 received critical acclaim upon release. It became the second Pixar film (after Up) and third animated film overall (after Beauty and the Beast and Up) to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. The film received four more Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound Editing, Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, winning the latter two. Toy Story 3 grossed over $1 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2010—both in North America and worldwide—and the fifth highest-grossing film at the time of its release, as well as the third highest-grossing animated film of all time and the first animated film to generate $1 billion in ticket sales. A sequel, Toy Story 4, directed by Lasseter is scheduled to be released on June 21, 2019.
Andy is now 17 and off to college and he has to wonder what he plans on doing with the toys that he grew up with. The toys wonder themselves what will become of them even though they know the day would come eventually. Andy decides to put them in the attic but his mom accidentally thinks it is trash and the toys eventually land inside a donation box to Sunnyside Day Care, where the toys believe that they will get more play time with new kids. But they soon discover that not everything is as it seems at Sunnyside as they soon become prisoners inside the day care which leads to many things happening in the process.
Now, I was very worried especially how threequels to other computer animated films are inferior to their predecessors (Shrek The Third and Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs).
But, right from the start, I knew that I wouldn’t be disappointed. I have just seen something that I’ve never seen before, a strong trilogy of films that got better with every film. This really is my favorite movie of the year so far. In fact, I was moved by the end of this film.
I almost teared up a bit when you heard Andy talking about these toys to this small kid that he’s donating them to. It’s the perfect finale to this story. It’s a great to see Woody and Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the Toy Story gang on the big screen once again and it is also one of the rare summer movies this year that hasn’t disappointed me, the other being Iron Man 2. The story is very well-written by Michael Arndt, who wrote one of my favorite movies from the last decade ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, the visuals are astonishing, the cast is well-acted in this, and above all, this is the first 3D film that I’ve seen where I wouldn’t have mind seeing this in 2D. Like if I had to see this again on the big screen in 2D, I wouldn’t mind seeing it.
5. Pinocchio (1940)
Pinocchio is a 1940 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and based on the Italian children’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. It was the second animated feature film produced by Disney, made after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
The plot of the film involves an old wood-carver named Geppetto who carves a wooden puppet named Pinocchio. The puppet is brought to life by a blue fairy, who informs him that he can become a real boy if he proves himself to be “brave, truthful, and unselfish”. Pinocchio’s efforts to become a real boy involve encounters with a host of unsavory characters. The film was adapted by Aurelius Battaglia, William Cottrell, Otto Englander, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Ted Sears, and Webb Smith from Collodi’s book. The production was supervised by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, and the film’s sequences were directed by Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, and Bill Roberts. Pinocchio was a groundbreaking achievement in the area of effects animation, giving realistic movement to vehicles, machinery and natural elements such as rain, lightning, snow, smoke, shadows and water. The film was released to theaters by RKO Radio Pictures on February 23, 1940.
Critical analysis of Pinocchio identifies it as a simple morality tale that teaches children of the benefits of hard work and middle-class values. Although it became the first animated feature to win a competitive Academy Award – winning two for Best Music, Original Score and for Best Music, Original Song for “When You Wish Upon A Star” – it was initially a box office disaster. It eventually made a profit in its 1945 reissue, and today it is considered among the finest Disney features ever made, and one of the greatest animated films of all time, with a rare 100% rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes. The film and characters are still prevalent in popular culture, featuring at various Disney parks and in other forms of entertainment. In 1994, Pinocchio was added to the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
When you think of one of the greatest animated movies of all time, Pinocchio is definitely one that is often put up on that list and I can attest that they are definitely not kidding at all.
This one really is a spectacle to believe. Everything about this movie just works so well, it’s no wonder why it’s a movie that has stood the test of time and become known as one of Disney’s all time best.
The animation is spectacular, some of the most impressive animation that has ever been shown in any movie I’ve ever seen, so realistic and fluent, it’s one of the best looking animated movies the studio has ever produced.
The characters are all memorable, Pinocchio, Gepetto, Jiminy Cricket, the Blue Fairy, all of the characters in this movie are so perfectly handled here and each of them still hold up well.
The story is great, not only making for a fun enjoyable animated movie but also managing to have important morals to tell kids and showing the effects of avoiding those morals, regardless of how dark it can get and you thought Snow White got dark, holy mother of god, the Pleasure Island scenes alone still give me the creeps even today. But the film also knows shows kids how to avoid these types of things too so you actually do learn about life lessons here.
The music is fantastic, once again, this is one where no matter how hard you try, you will never forget a song like When You Wish Upon A Star no matter how hard you try.
There’s really not a whole lot more that can’t really be said because what’s been said about has already been said, Pinocchio really is one of the great achievements in animation, taking a beloved story and making it memorable with its’ spectacular animation, great characters, great story, great morals, and great music. It truly is a Disney classic and one of their crowning achievements.
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