John Lasseter’s Toy Story is funny, tightly made and unusually good at making awkward characters worth caring about. Randy Newman’s music sometimes overstates things; the quarrelling voices of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen need little help.
Toy Story knows how quickly a quarrel can become the most important thing in a household. John Lasseter lets the rivalry between Woody and Buzz Lightyear drive an animated adventure, giving their disagreements the attention usually reserved for a family falling out. It is a funny, economical comedy that takes childish feelings seriously. We would recommend it to people who usually leave animation to the children.
Tom Hanks makes Woody’s irritation sound like something he has spent time justifying to himself. There is warmth in the voice, but Hanks can tighten it until every apparently sensible objection begins to sound personal. Tim Allen’s Buzz is a fine source of further irritation: the delivery is so assured that Woody has almost nothing useful to argue with. We laughed at that mismatch, then felt for Woody, because Hanks lets the effort of sounding reasonable become painfully audible.
Joss Whedon, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow and Andrew Stanton’s screenplay trusts a family audience to recognise pettiness without pausing to explain it. The adult jokes sit comfortably inside a story whose central disagreement a child can understand. Don Rickles gives Mr. Potato Head a useful sharpness, while Wallace Shawn’s Rex has the worried sound of someone already regretting joining the conversation. Both make the toys around Woody and Buzz worth listening to, which helps keep the central quarrel from swallowing the comedy.
The computer animation gives the toys a satisfying solidity; we can imagine picking them up. That matters when they start behaving badly, because their feelings become easier to accept once their bodies feel familiar. Lasseter lets us look closely enough to enjoy the objects themselves without making the film stop for admiration. Even with the technical novelty put aside, the characters are expressive enough to keep a conversation interesting.
Editors Robert Gordon and Lee Unkrich keep the exchanges brisk while allowing an awkward reaction to register. At 81 minutes, the film has little room for a joke that merely repeats the last one, and the cutting generally respects that limit. Randy Newman’s music supplies warmth, though it sometimes tells us to soften towards the characters a little sooner than their voices require. We would have preferred less prompting in those passages; Hanks and Allen already give us enough to decide how we feel.
Family animation can become cautious once a character risks seeming unpleasant. Lasseter lets Woody irritate us and allows Buzz’s certainty to be funny without continually stopping to reassure us that both mean well. Their rivalry has the recognisable strain of people who have to share attention, which gives the adventure something at stake before it becomes busy. That makes it easy to care about a quarrel that might otherwise seem small.
Choose it for a shared evening, including the adults who say they do not care for cartoons. Children should be allowed to enjoy the bad behaviour without a running explanation of what it all means. Afterwards, resist the temptation to tell the person beside you which toy they resemble.
