Toy Story 2

365 Films

Entry #137

Toy Story 2 (1999)

Directed by John Lasseter

I know I'm skipping around the chronology here a bit but let's just say this is where inspiration has taken me and I'm not answering any more questions.  Toy Story 2 was an anomaly at the time in that it did look a bit odd for a company that had only been producing features for the past four years to resort to a sequel of its flagship film.  Not that I'm going to do as anything as laborious as research, but my understanding of the events that led to Toy Story 2's inception involved a former CEO of the Walt Disney Company holding the idea of the film as hostage in a tense negotiation session with Pixar.  I believe the bottom line of those talks instilled the idea that Disney was planning on making a Toy Story 2 with our without Pixar's involvement.  My memory is failing me at the moment but somewhere in the bowels of the internet there is a plot synopsis that was pitched for a non-Pixar Toy Story 2 and it is as garish as the very idea would suggest it be.  Once again, unless I'm remembering some sort of dream I had, the idea was then pitched for Toy Story 2 to be a direct to video (I think video still existed back then) release until the parties that be simply couldn't let their baby franchise go to waste and stepped in at the last minute to produce the astounding sequel we have today.  The reason I bring all of this is up to highlight the idea that Toy Story 2 is a film that almost didn't happen, and by didn't happen, I should emphasize "could have become a massive pile of shit."  Under the gun and scrambling at the last minute, the good people at Pixar produced not only an entirely worthy companion piece to the original (and subsequent third film), but one of the most moving and soulful sequels of all time.  Far from simply xeroxing the contents of the original with the sole purpose of showing off the advancements in the computer animation, Toy Story proved Pixar to be a company worthy of dazzling optic nerves while simultaneously rendering one's heart from one's chest and stomping all over it (in the most gentlest of ways) while subsequently offering their shoulder on which to cry.  It's impossible to talk about Toy Story 2 without mentioning the autumn hued elephant standing in the middle of the room.  I remember sitting in the theater and when the sequence depicting Jessie's fall from grace and thinking to myself, "what the fuck is going on?"  To put yourself in my mindset, here I am, enjoying the antics of Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the gang when these images appear on screen that look as if they were ripped straight from entirety of human memory.  As if a collected data bank of child hood memories exists somewhere just so highly skilled filmmakers can deploy them at the appropriate moments to shatter our hearts into a thousand pieces.  An entire lifetime of joy, sorrow, and regret all wonderfully encapsulated by little more than  piece of music and some moving images.  Reading that, you're probably thinking "no shit, isn't that why cinema was created."  I would counter that with yes, but nothing even remotely close to have had ever been attempted with this new era of digital effects driven cinema, let alone animation.  Toy Story 2 boldly and courageously took an enormous leap into uncharted territory by calmly explaining to its audience that yes, you can have these characters back, but at a price.  And that price is we must watch them get older, live longer, and ultimately grapple with the inevitable bargain we all eventually make in our futile quest for more time.  Fair warning: if you think this is a grim assessment, just wait until we get to Toy Story 3.  Even at the age of twenty-six, I found it to be the one of the most traumatizing cinematic experiences of recent memory and I don't quite know if I've steeled myself up to face it again.  We shall see.