Toy Story Review
Pixar's 1995 landmark still holds up. It is visually inventive, emotionally grounded, and funny for all ages in ways few animated films match.
John Lasseter
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs gets cited endlessly as the film that proved feature animation could work as a serious artistic and commercial proposition. The comparison is apt but it obscures something important: Snow White is historically significant in ways that its actual quality as a film does not always support. Toy Story occupies the same kind of landmark position, it was the first feature-length computer-animated film and the film that established Pixar as a creative force Unlike Snow White, it earns that status on the merits of the movie itself rather than the mere fact of its existence.
Directed by John Lasseter and released by Disney in 1995, Toy Story is built on a premise that turns out to be nearly perfect as a vehicle for the technology behind it. Woody (Tom Hanks), the beloved pull-string cowboy of young Andy's toy collection, finds his place threatened by the arrival of Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), a space ranger action figure who does not yet know he is a toy. When Woody's jealousy sends Buzz tumbling out a window, the two find themselves stranded in the outside world and forced into an uneasy alliance to get back to Andy before moving day. Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, and Annie Potts also star.
The reason the film's CGI holds up when so much early computer animation does not comes down to a decision that was, in retrospect, exactly right. Toys are plastic, matte, and geometrically simple. They are inherently inhuman by design even if they are designed to be humanoid. The uncanny valley, that particular failure mode where something almost-but-not-quite human registers as deeply unsettling, simply does not apply to Woody and Buzz in the way it would to a photorealistic human face rendered on 1995 hardware. The film sidesteps the most dangerous territory of early CGI not by solving the problem but by choosing a subject that does not have it.
What Lasseter adds on top of that technical good fortune is a visual language that feels genuinely authored. Pizza Planet, Sid's bedroom, the gas station all have a specificity that goes beyond set dressing. They communicate the world as toys might experience it: overwhelming in scale, indifferent to their existence, full of hazards that read as mundane to everyone else. That perspective is where the film finds its emotional register, which works for a child who finds the adventure thrilling and an adult who recognizes the anxiety underneath it. That's not even to say anything about the unique retro-futuristic aesthetic of Pizza Planet that definitely captured my imagination as a child
The one element that shows its age is the human character design. Andy, his mother, and Sid are rendered with the waxy, slightly-off quality that the toys themselves entirely escape, and there are moments where the gap between the main characters and the humans sharing the frame is noticeable enough to pull you out of the scene. It is a minor complaint against a film that gets almost everything else right, but it is the one place where the technology's limits are visible.
At the end of the day, Toy Story remains one of the most complete animated films ever made. It was and remains a pioneering force of filmmaking technology while still being emotionally grounded and funny in ways that do not condescend to children or adults. If you have not revisited it since childhood, you should.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
