Toy Story Review

The technology is the historical footnote. What makes it last is a script about professional envy that is honest about how ugly envy gets. Woody is not a hero for most of this film. He lies, he sulks, he knocks a rival out of a window and then has to live with the room's verdict, and the redemption is earned rather than assumed. Buzz's delusion is played for laughs and then treated seriously enough to hurt, which is a hard turn to manage in eighty minutes.

Tom Hanks and Tim Allen both understand that they are playing men rather than toys. Lasseter and his team build the design around what the hardware could actually render, plastic surfaces and shiny paint and hard edges, which is why the images still read cleanly thirty years on while other computer work of the era looks like a software demo. Randy Newman's songs carry narration duty and one of them is a standard now. Sid's house is genuinely frightening. It runs eighty one minutes, wastes none of them, and set a standard the studio spent two decades chasing.