/ 24 March 2000

Toys keep swinging

Few sequels are as good as, and hardly any better than, the works they follow. I was brought up to believe that the New Testament was superior to the Old Testament, and in the Seventies I arrived independently at the conclusion that The Godfather Part II was superior to The Godfather. I’m no longer certain about either of these judgments. But, as of this moment, and after a second viewing, I’m pretty certain that the computer-generated Toy Story 2 is even better than Toy Story, which brought us such delight back in 1995 when cowboy Woody, astronaut Buzz Lightyear, dinosaur Rex and piggy-bank Hamm first came slaloming down the slopes of little Andy’s middle-American nursery.

The first film introduced the toys and pitted Woody, hero of the Old Frontier, against Buzz, embodiment of the technological future. The sequel assumes our familiarity with its characters, who despite a certain playful friction work together as a mutually supportive team. The result is a movie that is dazzlingly inventive in its graphic detail, tells an exciting story and raises complex ideas with clarity and wit.

Andy is off for a few days at cowboy camp, but because Woody’s arm is frayed at the shoulder, he doesn’t take his faithful sidekick with him. After a film noir-style nightmare, in which he imagines himself consigned to a dustbin, the intrepid Woody (voiced with touching sincerity by Tom Hanks) is kidnapped while saving Wheezy the penguin from a yard sale. So he too becomes the object of a rescue mission led by Buzz Lightyear. Woody’s abductor is the sinister Al, proprietor of Al’s Toy Barn, a figure out of Pinocchio.

It is breathtaking the way John Lasseter and his fellow computer wizards involve us emotionally with their creations, making us not only care for them as they risk their lives for each other, but also making us worry about their dilemmas and moral problems.

Of course, although adult human beings figure in the film – the egregious Al, Andy’s solicitous mother – it is the toys that parents will identify with. They are the people discarded by growing children and left wondering about life’s purpose. And there’s a discomfiting feeling that this movie could induce guilt in children – or encourage them to hang on too long to toys and childhood.

Let me not make heavy weather out of the sunniest of movies just because it recognises the existence of rain and storms. I roared with laughter at scenes such as that in which the rescue team creating chaos as they cross a busy city street, and at Buzz’s attempts to convince an obtuse state-of-the-art version of himself that he’s only a toy.

There is a brilliant joke about Star Wars that children will love, and a touching reference to John Ford’s The Searchers that they won’t get. At the end, nobody will leave the cinema before the lights go up because, like the same production company’s A Bug’s Life, the final credits are accompanied by a series of hilarious out-takes.