Word: toying
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...Pixar--an independent studio that uses Disney as a distributor--first made a splash back in 1995 with the original Toy Story, the highest grossing movie of that year and the spark that kindled the computer animation glut. (You won't be seeing any more paint/cel animated films for a long time to come....) But Toy Story was special not because it had kids forking over $8 to see the movie a dozen times, but because it brought the adults back to animation. Not since Aladdin or the Lion King had we had indulged in a cartoon that purposely surfed...
...Disney normally doesn't do animated sequels (They have no problems with live-action ones, though; a recent preview already advertises 102 Dalmatians, which opens next Thanksgiving. What an abomination.) But Toy Story almost begged a sequel because its characters created an apoplectic microcosm whose surface could barely be scratched in a mere 90 minutes. Besides Woody and Buzz Lightyear, our animated Don Quixote and Pancho Sanza (the fun is figuring out who exactly is more deluded), you have the returning Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (now officially married), Slinky Dog, the incontinent Hamm, the still neurotic...
...original Toy Story had two problems. First and foremost, the animation, though incredibly detailed, still seemed--well, too shiny. Sure, the toys looked great, but the humans had plasticky visages and seemed cut and pasted from a B-grade video game. The sequel gets it right. Director John Lasseter (the hottest man in Showbiz right now) and his crew at Pixar studied countless pictures of human skin in order to perfectly recreate it--we see Al McWhiggen's pores, his nose hairs, his mild case of adult acne. In fact, Lasseter is so confident in his company's animation capabilities...
...wonder whether Pixar will ever split from Disney. God knows they'll have the money after Toy Story 2 finishes its run (the gross could potentially top out at $300 million). If they do go independent, expect an epic showdown. Unlike every other major studio that has recently built an in-house animation studio, Pixar has the goods to compete with the Mouseketeers. But such animated politics need not concern us. Like I said, we don't want to know why. We don't want to know how. We just want our cartoon...
...seems that every studio's major Oscar contender runs at 160 minutes. Two hours and 40 minutes to tell a story? I have no doubt that Toy Story 2 tells a bigger, faster, cooler...