Toy Story 2

 


I watched the original Toy Story movie when it came out, and I probably watched the second one when it came out as well. Recently I watched both back to back in the same day, and I have to say, while the first installment of the franchise is a monumental piece of filmmaking because it ushered in a new era of animation-parts of it don't really hold up. I mean that a lot of the animation of the human characters is horrifying, it looks really, really creepy. The second movie, even though it came out a few years later, the animation looks much better, although it's not totally perfect. The animation at this point was not at a stage where things are not creepy. For example, there is a dog character in the film that is animated more like the idea of a dog than an actual dog. They were still having troubles animating real creatures. The toys look really awesome in this and I have to say even though the story of the sequel is a lot more complicated than the original I actually prefer this one. The whole franchise has this idea of growing up and what you lose when you grow up, and the toys are kind of there as a sort of mirror that children can look at. They know it's about the toys being sad that Andy's growing up, but kids can also realize oh yeah I'm going to grow up someday, and I'm not going to be playing with these toys any more, and you know things are going to change for me and I think that metaphor is at the heart of the franchise. It's in this part of the story as well, but there's also this idea of collecting toys and preserving the history of childhood. I think it says something also about how adults view childhood and how children view childhood. Adults want to make childhood this kind of picture that they sometimes remember, and they want things to be like, oh you know, I watched this movie when I was young, and I'm going to show you this movie, and we went here when we were young, and I'm going to take you here. We kind of want our children to have the same experiences that we had when we were young, and it's kind of an artificial exercise. That's why the movie works so well because it's all about that conflict of this artificiality of preserving the past and recreating the past and on the other hand being open to what actually happens in the future. 

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