by Patrick Taggart
Twilight
Zone experts
will know the details of this better than I, but you may remember an episode
from the much-missed series that involved a peculiar group of people who lived
at the bottom of an empty metal cylinder.
One of the characters was a ballerina, I think, and there may have been a
clown. (Too many years have passed since channel surfing produced this
particular episode.) Strange group of people, no one quite sure how they got
there, everyone wanting to get out.
The mystery of their singular dilemma is solved in the patented Rod Serling
style: In the last shot, a person opens the lid to a container marked for
unwanted dolls going to the needy. The “people” inside are the alienated toys
come to life.
Picking up on that theme, minus the existentialism, is Disney’s Toy
Story. Too late to copyright this information, but the film is a giant
success critically and popularly, and for good reason.
First, there is the technology, which raises the stakes even higher than the
lofty level set by The Nightmare Before Christmas. This is said to be
the first feature-length film done in computer-generated animation, although
the use of it in short films is now many years old. But even if there is
nothing new about it, Disney’s use of the technology in one of their
high-visibility holiday releases brings it to a new and adoring public.
And they haven’t been lazy or gimmicky. The movie is imaginatively conceived
and devoid of technical wizardry for its own sake. All of the engineering is
placed in service of the story.
The story is really what makes Toy Story a remarkable film. If in broad
outline it feels familiar — two protagonists of widely different backgrounds,
or cultures unite to conquer a common problem — it is richly fresh and quirky
in the details. Almost all of Disney’s animated features have been
distinguished by the sidekick characters, from Thumper all the way to Toy
Story‘s Mr. Potato Head. The new film has a whole community of sidekicks.
Better, it has character where it matters. Too many of Disney’s recent
animated films, all mostly laudable in style and content, have treated
personality in the starkest terms. Beginning with Beauty and the Beast,
and continuing with The Lion King and Pocahontas, Disney heroes
and heroines tend to be supremely virtuous, mythically admirable, and devoid of
fatal flaws. Good role models for kids, boring for the rest of us. Villains
have likewise been unredeemable, cynical lowlifes possessing not a speck of
kindness or generosity.
Toy Story scraps all that for at least two richly nuanced characters.
We expect Woody, the cowboy toy who seems to serve not only as marshal but
moral force of his bedroom community, to be a sort of animated Shane. But it
turns out this thoroughly likable cowpoke (and what character possessing the
voice of Tom Hanks isn’t likable?) is also a jealous type and doesn’t hesitate
to cause someone else trouble to further his own aims. His nemesis and eventual
ally, the space toy Buzz Lightyear, is revealed to be more than a little
grandiose.
In short, Toy Story creates a world of believable folk, characters with
good qualities and not-so-good qualities, characters who resemble us. That
these “people” are flawed hardly makes them any less sympathetic. And the
filmmakers spend so much energy ensuring that we have a rollicking good time
that the presence of less-than-perfect heroes does nothing to dampen the fun.
Disney’s mythical adventures serve a purpose in providing moral lessons for
youngsters in an undeniably entertaining context (although we could have done
without the swishy portrayal of the villain in Lion King). The value of
Toy Story is its boisterous, unapologetic, unvarnished humanity.
In the last year or so I’ve
been wondering if mainstream Hollywood films weren’t heading off in twodistinct directions, leaving a middle ground that couldn’t quite span the
distance between, say, the films of Rob Reiner and Bob Zemeckis, and Quentin
Tarantino and Abel Ferrara.
The style gap, if that’s what it is, has been bridged temporarily at least by
Sean Penn’s The Crossing Guard. This underrated film, which just
finished on exclusive two-week run at the Village Theatre, marches to its own
dreamy rubato and creates a world that is not quite like any other — except,
perhaps, that of the films of John Cassavetes. This is only Penn’s second film
as writer-director and it’s a little early to nail his style or vision. But
The Crossing Guard is evidence of at least a special gift. n
This article appears in December 15 • 1995 and December 15 • 1995 (Cover).