Toy Story 3 Review

Lee Unkrich closes the trilogy by asking what toys are for once the child outgrows them, and the answer is unsentimental enough to justify the crying it causes. The Sunnyside act plays as a prison picture in miniature, complete with a corrupt warden in Lotso, a strawberry-scented bear whose backstory reframes cruelty as abandonment turned outward, while Michael Keaton's Ken supplies enough farce to keep the allegory from curdling.

What separates this from ordinary franchise maintenance is the incinerator sequence, where Pixar holds on a wordless shot of the toys giving up and joining hands, a gamble no other studio would have taken in a summer release aimed at children. The handoff to Bonnie that follows resolves an emotional argument rather than a plot one, and Tom Hanks plays Woody's last look back with real restraint.

The animation has gained texture without losing the plastic-and-felt logic that made the first film legible, and Randy Newman stays out of the way until he should not. Some of the middle-act escape mechanics are busier than they need to be. The ending is close to perfect, and it lands the whole trilogy at once.