How Green Was My Varmint.
Previously on Toy Story: After Toy Story 3 proved the perfect finale for Pixar’s flagship series, the formerly impeccable animation studio held the IP upside-down and shook really hard to see if any more coins might fall out of Hamm’s back-hole. I later summed up the fourth one…
The series was OVER. The trilogy was COMPLETE. The finale with Bonnie was PERFECT. But no, Pixar had to yank out the stitches on that beautiful closure and march Bonnie’s toys through the motions of yet another toys-on-the-run escapade that benches half its all-stars, loses track of its own rules, manufactures one needless chase too many, and drops one of its decent, nonwhite human characters into a disturbingly harrowing police encounter — blithely pretending such a scene evokes absolutely no alarming real-world relevance — all so Sheriff Woody can ride off into the sunset AGAIN, but this time literally instead of metaphorically. We were FINE with “metaphorically”.
Our family crossed Pixar films off our automatic-theater-trip shortlist years ago. Among the next nine films since TS3, I’ve only seen three on the big screen and have yet to fire up Hoppers or The Good Dinosaur. I refused in advance to let the inevitable Toy Story 5 be an easy sell. The presence of director Andrew Stanton — overseer of the classics Finding Nemo and WALL-E — brought slight hope till I remembered his last time at a Pixar helm was Finding Dory, ten years ago and just-okay. But a few tidbits among the pro critics’ advance reviews caught my attention, chiefly that Stanton and co-writer Kenna Harris (a Pixar staffer responsible for Luca‘s epilogue short Ciao Alberto) found new conflicts to explore for a few of the toys and for li’l Bonnie herself, their current caretaker.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 