Review: Toy Story 2

Toy Story 2 is not just a perfect sequel, but a perfect movie – though the fact it’s a perfect movie is entirely contingent on the fact that it’s also a sequel. A debut film simply would not have had time to lay the necessary groundwork to do justice to the questions that Toy Story 2 tackles, and its success is directly derived from its reliance on ideas raised in the first movie, on character development that flows organically from our established understanding of Woody and Buzz, and on expanding their microcosmic world in new and interesting ways.

A story in which Woody seriously considers leaving Andy for a museum in Tokyo could not have existed without one in which he realizes his precarious position in Andy’s affections. A story in which Buzz goes on a dangerous journey to rescue his friend from this folly could not have existed without one in which he’s convinced by that same friend that being a toy is a noble calling.

And a story that explores the impermanence of toys in a child’s life could not have existed without one that already dealt with some of the fears they grappled with in their day-to-day life, whether it was being damaged, lost, or replaced.

So with their first sequel, Pixar demonstrated they knew what a good follow-up should be: a story that expands on the original without repeating it, one that builds on ideas and relationships that have already been established, and one that takes the familiar characters off in new and interesting directions. You can apply these rules to all the best sequels, from The Empire Strikes Back to The Dark Knight to Paddington 2.

Nobody regresses or forgets lessons already learnt; instead they move forward and learn new ones, which are supplemented by new characters, locations and set pieces – none of which are introduced for their own sake, but to better highlight the story’s central theme.

That theme is best summed up in The Dolls’ House by Rumer Godden, another writer of toy stories that I just-so-happen to be reading at the moment, who wrote: “it is an anxious, sometimes dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose, they can only be chosen; they cannot do, they can only be done by; children who do not understand this often do wrong things, and then their dolls are hurt and abused and lost.”

So if the motivating fear of the first Toy Story was the possibility of getting lost and ending up in the hands of a cruel playmate, then Toy Story 2 is about a much more inescapable fate: the abandonment that comes when a child inevitably grows up; of toys being shelved and forgotten and discarded over time.

It’s impossible not to compare this to Empty Nest Syndrome; the previous film already set up the concept of the toys as guardians and teachers to Andy (“the important thing is that we’re here for Andy when he needs us”) and the unexplained absence of Andy’s father adds another layer to Woody’s importance in his life. If Woody is Andy’s surrogate father, then he’s now facing the possibility of a future without him.

This fear of no longer being needed is a theme that permeates everything, from Andy not taking Woody to cowboy camp when the seam of his arm is ripped, to Wheezy (a penguin whose squeaker no longer works) being cast out into a yard sale, to the entirety of Jessie’s backstory and the tempting future the Prospector offers as recourse to the inevitable. One day these toys won’t be needed or wanted anymore, and then what becomes of them?

In the words of Andy’s mother: “toys don’t last forever,” a sentiment that’s as true at the end of the film as it was at the beginning – what must change is Woody’s understanding and acceptance of it.

***

After being left behind when Andy goes away on his annual camping trip (or “shelved” as the other toys describe it, in such a way that suggests something shameful has just occurred), Woody undergoes an impromptu rescue mission to save Wheezy from a yard sale, one that ends with him accidentally landing on a table of secondhand goods.

It’s there he catches the attention of a would-be buyer, and despite the efforts of Andy’s mother, Woody is whisked away in the man’s car, leaving Bo Peep to ask in horrified wonderment: “why would anyone steal Woody?”

The answer is that all this time, unbeknownst to anyone (including himself), Woody has been a highly collectible figure from a 1950s television phenomenon known as “Woody’s Roundup”. The black-and-white show serialized the adventures of Sheriff Woody and his friends in the Wild West, and the man who snatched Woody (the Al of Al’s Toy Barn) has been accumulating show-related paraphernalia for years.

All he needed to complete the collection was Woody himself, and with that done he can sell everything on to a toy museum in Tokyo for an exorbitant fee.

Although Woody’s first instinct is to get home as quickly as possible, he gradually gets to know the other members of the Roundup Gang – vivacious cowgirl Jessie, loyal horse Bullseye, and the sage-like Prospector, an old miner who is still mint in his box. They’ve been in storage for years and are looking forward to a new life in Japan – especially Jessie, who suffers from claustrophobia and abandonment issues.

With Andy’s decision to leave him behind still playing on his mind, Woody begins to seriously consider the possibility of going with them…

***

Meanwhile, a little detective work gives the rest of Andy’s toys a name and location for Woody’s kidnapper, and it’s Buzz who leads Mr Potato Head, Hamm, Slinky and Rex in a rescue mission to bring him home before Andy’s return. Juxtaposing Woody’s identity crisis with the other toys navigating the dangers of the world in their quest to find him works well, with Buzz succeeding through a combination of strategic thinking and lucky coincidences (they manage to pull off the latter by making them very funny – the toys crossing a busy main road under traffic cones is as hilarious as it is nail-biting).

Buzz is not quite as prominent this time around; he essentially completed his character arc in the first film and now becomes the one trying to teach Woody something, stepping into a leadership role among the other toys along the way.

I suspect this is the reason why he’s given the opening sequence to the film, where we watch him break into one of Emperor Zurg’s space-fortresses, which then turns out to be Rex playing a Buzz Lightyear video game. It helps gives him a bit more presence, and hits us with a dose of sci-fi in a film that’ll soon lean heavily into a Wild Western aesthetic.

This tension between “old and new”, as depicted through the spaceman/cowboy motifs was present in the first film, but really sets the tone for the sequel’s entire story. If Woody wants to live forever, he has to embrace his existence as a valuable but outdated collectible item; as something to be put in a glass case and never played with again.

It’s clever that this is essentially the inverse of Buzz’s identity crisis from the first film: whereas Buzz grappled with the reality that he wasn’t special, Woody is faced with the reality that he is – not just in Andy’s eyes, but the world’s.

And of course, at this point Woody isn’t entirely sure if he is in fact special to Andy. His anxiety is exemplified in what became Pixar’s first real tearjerker: the montage of Jessie’s past with a girl called Emily, and the love she once bore for a toy she eventually outgrew. Ponies and campouts give way to phone calls and nail polish, though it’s worth pointing out that Emily didn’t abandon Jessie, rather she donated her to a charity – perhaps with the hope she would end up in the possession of another little girl.

It’s unclear whether Jessie realizes this, or what happened to her between the box of donated goods and Al’s acquisition of her. Either way, it doesn’t negate Jessie’s pain, and in her words: “You never forget kids like Emily or Andy, but they forget you.”

(Just to leap ahead a bit, this sentiment is beautifully defied in Toy Story 3, in which Andy doesn’t forget his toys, and so justifies Woody’s faith in him when he passes them all into to Bonnie’s safekeeping. It’s even foreshadowed at the conclusion of this film when Woody gets the context to Andy’s actions that Jessie presumably never did with Emily – it turns out Andy left him behind simply because he didn’t want him to get further damaged, and fixes the arm himself when he returns. Just as Woody looks after him, so too does he look after Woody).

But it’s with the Prospector that the film explores the true darkness of its abandonment theme. Early on he declares that Woody’s Roundup was cancelled when Sputnik went up, after which: “children only wanted to play with space toys!” The bitterness with which he spits out the words is our first indication that all is not right with the character, though you can’t help but feel a dash of pity for him when he later reveals he was stuck on a dime-store shelf for years while every other toy was sold.

To be loved or to be preserved is the choice that informs the motivations of all the members of Woody’s Roundup, but whereas Jessie can seize the chance of being loved by another child when the opportunity arises, the Prospector literally doesn’t know what he’s missing. Having never known the love of a child, the Prospector rejects the very possibility of it.

(Forgive this comparison, but he reminds me of those men who are incessantly complaining about how difficult it is to get a girlfriend, while simultaneously writing novel-length manifestos about how much they despise women. Replace “women” with “children” and there’s the Prospector in a nutshell).

But ultimately a sympathetic backstory doesn’t make a person right, and his attempts to physically prevent Woody from leaving cast him into the role of villain. Initially coming across as reasonable and fatherly, he’s clearly highly manipulative in hindsight, what with his warning: “it’s a dangerous world out there for a toy” (it’s all in Kelsey Grammar’s delivery of the line) and in secretly turning on the television to wake up Al and prevent Woody from sneaking out.

The Prospector is the first of many Disney/Pixar Hidden Villains, but the reveal works well here, and not just because the trope hadn’t been overplayed yet (since then we’ve had similar twists in Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, Zootopia, Big Zero Six and so on). The seeds of his villainy are there from the start, so even as it’s easy to get fooled, his nasty side is foreshadowed – unlike Hans or Bellwether, whose treachery comes the heck outta nowhere.

But there’s complexity in the Prospector, as he does seem to have genuine affection for Bullseye and Jessie (helping the latter through her panic attacks for example) and is correct in pointing out that if Woody does decide to go home, there are terrible repercussions for the rest of them (they go back into storage). He also makes a good argument when it comes to why Woody should choose the museum. As he puts it:

“How long will it last, Woody? Do you really think Andy is going to take you to college, or on his honeymoon? Andy’s growing up, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s your choice, Woody. You can go back, or you can stay with us and last forever. You’ll be adored by children for generations.”

And hey, who’s to say the museum itself wouldn’t have been great fun? It might have been like Night at the Museum, and it’s a credit to the writing that you’re left wondering whether Woody could have found a different sort of happiness if he had gone to Tokyo (especially by the time Toy Story 3 rolls around).

But on watching a child interact with his marionette-self on his own show, Woody comes to an epiphany: he has to return to Andy, even if it means one day he’ll be abandoned, because that’s his purpose in life. It’s reminiscent of the choice Odysseus makes: he could have stayed on Calypso’s island and lived forever, but it would have been a static life, one without his loved ones or any sort of closure on his former life – so he choses to leave.

Having decided to go back, Woody naturally can’t leave his new friends behind, and that’s when The Reveal happens. I still remember the gasp that went through the theatre when Woody turns around the Prospector’s box to find it empty.

***

The third act has everything you could wish for in a climactic finish: the toys hijacking a Pizza Planet car to get to the airport, a chase through the layered conveyer belts of the baggage handling system, and a narrow escape from the cargo hold of a plane that’s headed down the runway. It’s funny and suspenseful and extremely clever. Everyone gets to contribute to the excitement in some way, and the eventual victory feels totally earned.  

Just as Buzz was given a chance to fly at the conclusion of the first film, so too does Woody become the hero Andy has always imagined him to be, finally resolving the cliff-hanger that his show was left dangling on. As Jessie says: “that was definitely Woody’s finest hour.”

And naturally the villain gets his comeuppance, though it’s not too cruel a fate. The Prospector ends up in the hands of a little girl who promises him a makeover, and though he reacts with horror when he sees her Barbie, who has rainbows and clouds scrawled over her face, I actually have hope for him. He’s finally in the hands of a child who seems interested in holding on to him – who knows, perhaps he’ll eventually find happiness in being an artist’s canvas.

***

The Prospector left a surprisingly strong mark on the trilogy, as many of his lines and sentiments will be picked up again in Toy Story 3, giving him the retrospective role of a seer in several crucial ways. As he asks Woody: “do you think Andy will take you to college?” a question that’s eventually answered in an unexpected way, and his prophetic rant to the other toys: “you’ll spend an eternity rotting in some landfill,” becomes a very literal possibility when we move into the third movie.

So although Woody makes peace with the fact that Andy will one day grow up, and the movie ends on a note that feels pretty definitive (after all, the third installment didn’t arrive until over a decade later, allowing Andy to grow up in “real time”) the issues and questions raised in Toy Story 2 still linger. It all means that by the time we got to Toy Story 3, there were plenty of ideas left simmering – namely that one day Andy will have no need for his toys, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

As Woody tells Buzz: “it’ll be fun while it lasts,” and it is – at least until the next movie. And until then, Toy Story 2 has to be appreciated as a masterclass in elegant storytelling, with a tightly-coiled script that contains not an ounce of fat, one in which everything connects to something else, and which serves as the perfect bridge between its predecessor and the third instalment.

It’s not often that you come across superior sequels, but as the lynchpin in the trilogy, Toy Story 2 achieves the incredible and manages to elevate that which comes before and after it.  

Miscellaneous Observations:

Even just a few years after the first movie the CGI has improved exponentially. The human figures are still a little iffy, but the textures of the fabrics and the fur on Buster is pretty faultless.

As ever, the writers do brilliant work in finding the perspective of a toy and building the world around that point-of-view. Last time Andy’s toys were terrified of birthdays and Christmas; this time around it’s yard sales – and as before, they have drills in place to deal with these interruptions in their lives (like say, a rollcall to make sure everyone’s accounted for). It’s even in the little details, such as the fact Woody is described as “stolen” instead of “kidnapped.”

A frequent topic of discussion among viewers has always been the absence of Andy’s father. Is he deceased? A divorcee? A one-night stand? Okay, probably not that last one. For some reason I always figured that he walked out on Andy’s mum back when Molly was a baby (though I’ve no idea why I thought that – maybe because Andy always seemed surprising cheerful for a kid whose father had passed away) but there’s an interesting little hint when Andy’s mother describes Woody as “an old family toy.” 

To continue with the “Woody is Andy’s surrogate father” motif, it makes sense that he was handed down to him by his father who has since passed on – though I also like that it’s kept a mystery. The toys don’t know, so neither do we.

It’s difficult not to hear Sideshow Bob in the Prospector, and though I have nothing to back this up, I suspect it’s the reason Kelsey Grammar was cast. (Though recently I’ve also heard him as Blinky on Trollhunters). Of course, the fact that Stinky Pete was a short, tubby, bearded man means that the fandom didn’t really go to bat for him, but he’s truly one of my favourite movie villains, and if he’d been a bit cuter there would have been no end to the meta defending him.

Wayne Knight also more deserves credit as Al, for the sheer amount of energy he pours into his voice, and I liked that the animators clearly designed the character’s appearance on him.

I mentioned earlier that the toys manage to luck out quite a few times during the course of their adventure, though coincidence doesn’t always work out in their favour. I’m a big fan of Woody and Jessie getting ready to jump from the plane’s cargo hold and hearing a worker cry out: “hold it, there's a couple more bags coming from the terminal!” Whew, this will give them the time they need to – nope, someone else yells: “too late, put them on the next flight!” and slams the door on them.

The care with which foreshadowing and continuity is planted in the first act is truly amazing: not only do Buster, Mrs Potato Head and Al have important parts to play here, after only being mentioned in the first movie, but Buzz manages to deduce Woody’s location through an early appearance of an Al’s Toy Barn advertisement on the television, which comes complete with a map to the store’s location.

The chicken feathers that fly from the boot of the car, the license plate registration which reads LZTYBRN, even the way Buzz uses Mr Spell and the Etch-a-Sketch to gather his clues – it’s ingenious.

The segues are also worth noting, as they flow like water from one to another: from Al shouting “he’s like new!” which immediately shifts to a sign at the toy barn that declares: “new!” to the symbolic fireworks that appear behind Buzz during a rousing speech that fade out to the end-of-broadcasting message being watched at Al’s apartment.

Jessie and Bullseye are integrated so well into the proceedings that it’s almost a surprise to watch the first Toy Story movie and realize they’re not in it. A little more awkward is the inclusion of Wheezy, who’s a pretty clear case of Remember the New Guy – I mean, was he there in Andy’s room for the entire first movie and we just didn’t see him? There’s no way he could have been on the shelf the whole time since they literally moved house at the end of the last movie, so perhaps he was purchased between the move and the start of this film. 

Another addition is Jodi Benson (the Little Mermaid herself) as the voice of Barbie, in all her incarnations. Here the focus is on Tour Guide Barbie, though in Toy Story 3 we spend a lot more time with Molly’s Barbie, who appears to be… er… Gym Barbie?

As for the other toys, Rex gets a mini-arc of trying to beat the Buzz Lightyear game (finally conceding that he doesn’t have to – he’s lived it) while Mr Potato Head and Hamm gets most of the sardonic one-liners. It’s only Slinky who feels a little underused, as his role as best friend and right-hand man to Woody has since been replaced by Buzz.

Even when the writers take necessary short-cuts in the plot (just to keep things moving) they compensate by making them funny – like how Al’s apartment is just across the road from Al’s Toy Barn, something he complains about, but which makes it much easier for the toys to reach. And of course, the toys get home off-screen by way of an airport luggage carrier, though all we see of it is the baffled neighbours trying to figure out where it came from.

Just as viewers grappled with the idea of how a toy could “die” in the first movie, we’re now treated to more scenes that demonstrate the metaphysics of toys: it turns out they can have nightmares, are ticklish, and have a sense of smell (as we see in Woody’s reaction to Al’s bad breath). Go figure.

It’s always worth appreciating the quirky little details, such as the fact Woody can only whistle with one hand – the one belonging to the arm that’s been partially torn, forcing him to lift it to his mouth with his other hand. Or that the automatic sliding doors only open when all the toys jump in front of it in unison. Or the ominous “no children allowed” on the door of Al’s apartment block, which says so much about his life.

One thing did bother me though: that the burn mark on Woody’s forehead which Sid created in the previous film has mysteriously vanished. It’s especially odd since there was an obvious way the animators could have dealt with it: the toy-cleaner could have removed it when he comes in to fix up Woody. While we’re at it, there’s another oddity that Woody’s pull-string, despite having plenty of variations in the previous movie, now only seems to say: “there’s a snake in my boot!” (and we don’t hear it when he uses it as a swing-rope to save himself and Jessie on the plane?) But those are my only nitpicks.

Speaking of the toy-cleaner, his design is based on the central character in the Pixar short Geri’s Game, and there’s no reason to suppose he’s not the same person (after all, plenty of characters from the shorts make cameos in the films).

I can't believe I got this far without mentioning Emperor Zurg and the fake!Buzz! One of the film's greatest gags is when Buzz comes across an aisle full of doppelgangers, only for one of them to take his place and tag along with the rest of the gang before the real one manages to catch up. Also in tow is an action figure of Zurg, who completes the Star Wars allusions from the previous film in using the famous: "I am your father!" line.  (And knowing that Buzz gets an animated spin-off series, I'm curious to see if this declaration actually has any weight to it).

This film also marks the second lot of fake outtakes (after A Bug’s Life) which show the toys as actual actors messing up their lines and having accidents on the sets. So much work must have gone into these things, and yet they were a Pixar tradition that stopped around the time The Incredibles came out. I wonder why… maybe they were considered too meta? Or somehow broke the illusion of the stories?

Well, there’s no use ignoring the elephant in the room any longer. In light of John Lasseter’s misconduct, there’s a certain uneasiness in watching Bo Peep and Mrs Potato Head get left behind when the boys go off on their rescue mission (and don’t @ me with the fact Bo Peep is made of porcelain, they could have easily retconned her into plastic) or the outtake in which the Prospector is offering twin Barbies roles in any future Toy Story films and sleazily asking if they're totally identical.

There have always been a few adult gags in Pixar movies (here we’ve got Mr Potato Head reminding himself he’s a married spud when he sees the Barbie pool party and Buzz’s wings automatically popping up at Jessie’s heroics) but there’s an unpleasantness about the behind-the-scenes atmosphere that I refuse to let ruin the magic of the film itself.

Separating art from the artists is not a debate I’m going to get into today, but it’s one that inevitably comes up when you think of the lack of female protagonists in the early Pixar films (I feel we were lucky to get Jessie at all), and the controversy over removing Brenda Chapman as director during the making of Brave.