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Review:Toy Story 2
from the dusting-off-the-reviewers-cap dept.
Ok Toy Story was good. From its ground breaking animation, to its story, it was quite simply a wonderful movie. Real solid funny jokes for adults. Great jokes for kids. A lesson worth teaching. And all the while it remained visually amazing: when we finally got to the breathtaking crescendo of the final sequence with the toys chasing the truck, not only was it the most beautiful CGI ever seen, but we believed in the little charachters. They weren't pixels dancing before our eyes, they were a talking dinosaur and a Mr. Potato Head. Woody and Buzz were real.
Its the goal of animation to take still objects and convince an audience that they think, breath and exist outside of the screen. And Toy Story did it as well as it had ever been done in the past.
So we've got a pair of big shoes to fill for Toy Story 2. Everyone knows that sequels traditionally suck, and this sequel was originally destined by Disney to be a straight-to-video release (Ala the Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin cheeseball videos designed to milk a few bucks out of a franchise by bastardizing the charachters that captured our hearts just a few years earlier.
But let me say that Toy Story 2 pulls it off. Its a wonderful movie. And it does what few sequels have done: it surpases its original. This is one of the most entertaining films I've seen this year.
The Plot? Turns out Woody is a rare collectible toy. He's stolen by a toy collector and whisked off to be sold to collectors in Japan. The gang must rescue our fearless cowpoke leader, all while Woody wrestles with his destiny: A few short years left with an aging Andy, or a lifetime of being admired by children throughout the world.
All the charachters are back, with a few new ones to boot. Among the best of the new toys are Zurg (a quite funny Darth Vader parody that the film wastes no chance to exploit) Woody's female toy counterpart (expertly voiced by Joan Cusack) and a pengiun named weezy (who really shines at the end with one of the films best gags).
And as pixar likes to do, this is a kids movies, with references for the adults to get a big grin from. Witness a surprise Pixar cameo, numerous hilarious Star Wars references, and even a shot lifted directly from Jurassic Park. Each time you feel Lassater winking at you.
My complaints? The film breaks a rule set forth in the first movie by showing the adults faces. Part of the magic of the original was that it followed the longstanding tradition of representing authority figures below the neck. Presumably this was because rendering a human face was a challange that the animators weren't up to last time around: the childrens faces were mostly pretty weak. But this time around we see everything. On one hand, seeing Al's face is pretty impressive, and probably quite necessary for the way the story is laid out, but I still miss just seeing a pair of feet.
So if you aren't to old and caloused to tolerate seeing a children's movie, or if you enjoy computer animation, or if you just want to see the original 'Luxo' on the big screen, or if you just want to sit back for an hour and a half and enjoy good entertaining story telling, go see this now.
It's good to hear... (Score:3)
On an unrelated note, I think movies like Toy Story have an interesting significance: getting kids interested in computers. I mean, if you were four and you saw a CG movie as cool as Toy Story, wouldn't you want to figure out how they did all that with computers? (Actually, you can strike the "if you were four" part- I want to know too!) Furthermore, Toy Story (and Bug's Life, Antz, etc) don't strike me as being particularly "boy" movies, which means that they might have a hand in breaking the current gender imbalance that CS departments typically see these days. That would be good.
For more information (Score:4)
And, to go offtopic, I read it using Sitescooper [tsx.org], a funky off-line web formatting thingy written in Perl, aimed at PalmPilot users.
hey...?! (Score:3)
What the hell is happening to
Come on. We should go back to the old days, where people would print banal pointless drivel as the first post!
BTW Tip of the day:
do:-
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=x
where x=some string
to create a comments page all of your own!
A few comments.. (Score:4)
assure you that there is no "rule" about showing the face of on
adult. If you look at the film again, Andy's mom's face shows up
a bunch of times. Granted, the rendering of her features are pretty
poor, but you *do* see her.
I have to disagree with CmdrTaco's assertion that the children's' faces
were "weak" in the first film. View the video again and look at Sid and
Hanna's (Sid's sister) faces and I think you'll agree that the animation
and rendering are very good and more important very supportive of the story.
As for the new film, I *do* agree that it is great. After seeing it twice
I am ready to pack my bags and head to Burbank to see it at the "El
Capitan" (which is showing it digitally) for a third time.
Jessie, the cow girl, is IMHO the best character to come out of this new
film.
The technical advances made in this film are great but are not as big as a
jump from Toy Story to Bug's Life.
Lastly, Disney has missed the boat by not having the Toy Story DVD out buy
the time Toy Story 2 came out. This is similar to the merchandising screw
up Disney did with not having the toys ready when the first film came out.
Great movies v. great animated movies (Score:5)
Similarly, whenever I mention to someone how much I liked the movie Antz, the invariable response is to ask me what I thought of A Bug's Life. I bristle at the automatic lumping together of these two movies into some imagined category merely due to some unfortunate superficial similarities, namely that they're both computer-animated, and that they're both about insects.
It's a pity that Antz is doomed forever to be compared to the immeasurably inferior A Bug's Life (and let's not get into the infamous behind-the-scenes politics about the making of these two movies). While Antz was smart, relentlessly witty, and darkly funny, A Bug's Life was distressingly shallow, antiseptic, and soulless -- especially considering that many of the people behind it were responsible for the great Toy Story.
I went into Toy Story 2 on Thanksgiving Day with giddy anticipation tempered with a healthy measure of trepidation due to my previous disappointing experience with A Bug's Life.
I am happy to report that I needn't have worried. Toy Story 2 is a terrific movie. I sat through almost the entire film with a goofy grin that lasted well after I left the theater. While not as technically groundbreaking as the original Toy Story was (the improvements are more evolutionary than revolutionary), Toy Story 2 nevertheless packs quite a punch. It's certainly more ambitious in its story and action sequences -- almost to a fault (the action becomes perhaps a little too frenetic towards the end). It also manages to explore deep existential issues just like the first movie, although some of the emotional wallop has diminished and occasionally seems forced.
Which of the Toy Story movies did I prefer? It's a very tough call. While the sequel wildly exceeded my very high expectations -- which is saying quite a bit -- if forced to choose, I'd have to go with the original.
I believe that the greatness of a movie should be judged for the totality of the experience, and not merely a single facet. You may have noticed that in my evaluations of the various computer-animated movies of recent years, animation quality hardly figured in at all (especially since they were all excellently animated, albeit with different degrees of excellence).
Here's to great movies, computer-animated or not.
Re:For more information (Score:4)
Bruce
Expensive Sun boxes (Score:3)
TS2 renderfarm specs (Score:5)
Seriously, the renderfarm this time around consisted of around eight dozen 14-processor Sun Ultra boxes each with 8 Gb of memory and about 36 Gb of disk. Rendering times (using Renderman) ranged from 2 to around 20 hours per frame.
Sorry, Linux was really not used at all on TS2. Pixar managers use Macs and animation/technical people use SGIs, mostly Octanes these days. Suns are used only for the fileservers and renderfarm.
BTW here are the theaters showing TS2 in digital projection. It looks absolutely stunning and, because of the digital transfer from the original image files, it blows away 35mm film. You owe it to yourself to make the trip.
AMC 1000- Theater 2
1000 Van Ness Avenue at O'Farrell
San Francisco, CA 94109
(415) 922-4262
El Capitan
6838 Hollywood Boulevard
Hollywood, CA 90028
(800) 347-6396 or www.elcapitantickets.com [elcapitantickets.com]
Media Center North-AMC Burbank
201 East Magnolia Boulevard
Burbank, CA 91502
(818) 953-9800
Edwards Irvine Spectrum 21
65 Fortune Drive
Irvine, CA 32718
(949) 450-4900
Pleasure Island AMC 24
1500 Buena Vista Drive
Lake Buena Vista, FL 32830
(407) 298-4488
Legacy Cinemark 24
7201 Central Expressway
Plano, TX 75025
(972) 517-2444
Re:Too bad (Score:4)
For modeling and development, they use a lot of SGI octanes. They also use linux + mesa for some internal tools.
John Carmack
Satan's New Film... (Score:3)
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More info (Score:3)
The movie was done using Renderman (as are all of Pixar's films). More info could probably be found on the comp.graphics.rendering.renderman newsgroup (although there's not much discusion of the movie going on today).
C.
VeggieTale corrections and information (Score:3)
Phil's wife's name is Lisa.
Mike Nawrocki and Phil Visher do about 3/4 of the voices, Lisa does her share as well. The rest are friends and family, employees and a few hired guns.
It is true that we beat Toy Story to the punch, and we have also had tremendous video sales as well. Most of the studio uses octanes for for animating and rendering. We have a few 02s as well.
We currently started using Maya for our new prject, having use SoftImage in the past.
I can try to answer any other questions that you might have: ttoll@bigidea.com [mailto]