Features

Primary navigation

• The Ultimate Film Chart
• By decade
• Alphabetically
• Complete list

The Tri-County Area, the US, the present. When his shoulder is injured, the cowboy toy Woody is left behind when his young owner Andy goes off to cowboy camp. While rescuing Wheezy the Penguin from a yard sale, Woody is spotted and stolen by Al, a toy-store manager. Woody is actually a merchandising tie-in for Woody's Roundup, a television puppet show from the 50s. He will complete a set along with (Jessie the cowgirl, BuIIseye the horse and the still-boxed Stinky Pete the Prospector, all of whom Al wants to sell for a fortune to a Japanese toy museum.

Buzz Lightyear, another of Andy's toys, organises a rescue party which tracks Al to his store. There Buzz is boxed up and replaced by a new Buzz Lightyear model. Woody is persuaded by Jessie, who was donated to charity when her owner hit puberty, to stay with the collection. But when the first Buzz and rescuers find him, they convince Woody to return to Andy. Stinky Pete, however, is determined to go to the museum and sabotages the rescue. The second Buzz stays behind to forge a relationship with his father. The toys follow Al to the airport and spring the others during baggage handling. Stinky Pete is tucked into the rucksack of a little girl, while Woody saves Jessie from the plane's cargo hold with Buzz and Bullseye's help. Andy returns and Jessie and Bullseye are adopted into his toy family.

Although a triumph of cutting-edge technology, demonstrating fully the possibilities of computer animation, Toy Story has become such a much-loved film because of its profound, almost old-fashioned humanity. Woody, Buzz and the toy gang, down to the merest walk-on sight gag, are alive in the way all great cartoon creatures are alive (in no small part thanks to canny voice casting that exactly matches the character design). Like this sequel, the first film has an extremely sophisticated, surprisingly melancholy understanding of the importance, resonance and tragically brief shelf-life of the average plaything.

The follow-up may be inevitably less fresh and misses the freakish presence of Sid's mutant toys (the three-eyed grab-machine aliens from the first film, however, have a nice cameo), but it makes a few minor, effective upgrades. Randy Newman's musical numbers, for example, are integrated so as to serve the plot points. Toy Story 2 focuses even more tightly than the first film on the plight of creatures who are only 'alive' so long as they can retain the attention of their quixotic owners. Their in-built obsolescence is ultimately as poignant as the tiny lifespans of the Blade Runner replicants. So while the plot sets up Woody's rescue from the loathsome Al, affording the opportunity for all manner of extravagant action scenes - a road-crossing set-piece, with the toys hiding under traffic cones and achieving their end while causing human-level chaos they don't notice, and a splendid, protracted peril ride through the airport at the finale - the script takes care to show the downside of toy life. Jessie, for instance, sings about the loss other owner's love, signified by the junking of cowgirl ephemera in favour of make-up and pop records. The toy villain, one of those sad but valuable items who remains pristine in his original 50s box, yearns for a life in a museum, but Woody and the film finally recognise that toys have no real value, no life, unless they are played with.

Of course, any film with this message that comes (albeit at one remove) from Walt Disney and with an attendant merchandising blitz, has to cope with an ironic bite. Those in the know, especially exasperated parents, will love the cynical gags about the toy business: Rex the dinosaur discovers a Buzz Lightyear video game can't be won without the purchase of a tie-in manual; in the store Tour Guide Barbie explains an aisle-load of Buzz figures by noting that "in 1995, shortsighted retailers understocked." Barbie's licensees refused to allow her to appear in the original, which means she comes in for some hilarious joshing here and generally comes off as an airhead next to the spunkier Bo Peep and Jessie.

Al, the discount-toy entrepreneur, comes in for a lot of criticism, but the film takes advantage of his obsessions to fill in the backgrounds of its own inventions. Video games and the Star Wars franchise are parodied as the film delves into the relationship between Buzz and Zurg, while it also perfectly evokes the ramshackle charm - represented by Howdy Doody in the US and Muffin the Mule here - of vintage 50s puppet television, with an attendant panoply of lunch-boxes, toy gramophones, cereal promotions ("Cowboy Crunchies") and snake-in-the-boot jack-in-the-boxes. Like The Iron Giant, the film revisits the 50s for much of its inspiration, rediscovering in the era the dawn of marketing. But a full measure of Toy Story 2's success can be gauged by its undeniable appeal for children who have never seen a Western television show or played with a cowboy toy.

Helper links

• Contact us
• Help
• Terms of use
• Privacy
• Linking
• Site map
• Accessibility/standards