Toy Story 2<\/em> was an inevitability; the massive success of the original\u2014along with the general appetite Disney CEO Michael Eisner had for sequels\u2014meant Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear would return sooner than Pixar may have expected or wanted. But it\u2019s a testament to Pixar, a studio long thought of for their strikingly original stories and high-concept premises, that Toy Story 2 <\/em>remains the best sequel they made, all while giving us more of what we came to expect from the first movie: tensions running high between toys that come to life when their owners leave the room, memorably funny setpieces, and the commonplace bureaucracies of human existence being acted out by anthropomorphic inanimate objects. (That latter idea, in how it applies to so many non-human characters, is extremely pervasive in Pixar films.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Incredibles <\/em>was the exact opposite of an inevitability. It wasn\u2019t just the first Pixar film written and directed by the same person, Brad Bird, but Bird wasn\u2019t even part of the original core braintrust at Pixar. What\u2019s more, The Incredibles <\/em>is Pixar\u2019s first human-focused film, specifically about those gifted with superpowers like super-strength, speed, and elasticity. Bird, while new to Pixar, was not new to animation, making the brilliant The Iron Giant<\/em> after serving as a longtime creative consultant on The Simpsons<\/em>. The Incredibles<\/em> blends propulsive action (far more intense than anything Pixar had made before, with actual blood as well as children actively threatened by a super-villainous madman) with sly, knowing humor. That said, its underlying message about being gifted owes a dubious debt to the works of Ayn Rand, with the evil Syndrome (voiced by Jason Lee) depicted as odious because he wants to enable regular people to have the ability to harness superpowers because \u201cwhen everyone\u2019s super, no one will be.\u201d (This, in spite of the fact that Syndrome\u2019s hatred of the heroic Mr. Incredible begins with the latter getting frustrated at how the former, as a youth, idolizes him.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Incredibles<\/em>, it should be noted, works in spite of the Randian aspects; a hero grousing that he has to hide his powers, and those of his super-fast son, does eventually lead to the entire family embracing their inner strengths, prompting an action-packed second half that rivals the setpieces in any Marvel movie. But Bird\u2019s unsubtle commentary about exceptionalism isn\u2019t as clever as how he gave hisAmerican nuclear-family unit applicable powers. Helen Parr\/Elastigirl is super-stretchy to align with how moms are pulled in different directions;Violet\u2019s blend of invisibility and a force field reflect her inner teenage turmoil. And the commentary on exceptionalism is better served in Bird\u2019s 2007 follow-up, the top-tier Ratatouille<\/em>, in which the uncompromising culinary artiste is an anthropomorphized rat who just happens to be the best chef in Paris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Toy Story 2<\/em> and The Incredibles <\/em>are such disparate stories, but it\u2019s almost a miracle that the 1999 sequel even exists. The original aim for the sequel was to follow the same track as the follow-ups to Disney\u2019s Aladdin<\/em><\/a> and The Lion King<\/em>: exist solely as direct-to-video cash-grabs. But when Disney exec Joe Roth and others saw the story reels in late 1997, they realized they had an honest-to-goodness good film on their hands, and decided to send it to theaters for Thanksgiving 1999. As the still-fledgling studio was finalizing work on their sophomore effort, A Bug\u2019s Life<\/em>, Pixar couldn\u2019t fully give Toy Sto<\/em>ry 2 the attention it deserved until the start of that year, and Disney refused to budge on a release date, meaning the entire story had to be overhauled to meet the studio\u2019s own level of higher theatrical quality in record time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though this isn\u2019t entirely unheard of in animation history \u2013 even the recent smash hit Frozen II <\/em>went through extensive revisions, as depicted in the Disney+ docuseries Into the Unknown<\/em> \u2013 the fact that Toy Story 2<\/em> went through such a dramatic retelling is jaw-dropping both because the end result doesn\u2019t suggest a rushed or harried production and because the efforts that went into were Herculean. (In David Price\u2019s 2008 book The Pixar Touch<\/em>, he recounts a moment in which one exhausted animator accidentally left their infant in the back seat of a car at Pixar\u2019s staff parking lot. The child was fine, but it served as a humbling reminder of how overworked the animators were.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Pixar fast approaches its 30th anniversary of releasing feature films, they\u2019re also getting farther away from the films that not only defined them as a studio but also served as their very best titles. (It\u2019s not that Pixar isn\u2019t still making good films, but the early- and late-2000s run of WALL-E<\/em>, Up<\/em>, and Finding Nemo<\/em>, among others, feels so far away.) For as many similarities as you can spot in various titles from the studio, The Incredibles <\/em>and Toy Story 2 <\/em>are almost as different as you can imagine. But in each film, you can see animators brushing up against what\u2019s impossible to capture on screen and racing headlong into the unknown with stunning results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Incredibles<\/a>” and “Toy Story 2<\/a>” are both streaming on Disney+.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One, released 20 years ago, captured a singular, distinctive voice. The other, released 25 years ago, was the very definition of a group effort. Yet each are among Pixar\u2019s finest and most beloved works. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":593,"featured_media":24805,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1428,1399],"tags":[1429,1422],"class_list":["post-24804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-happy-birthday","category-looking-back","tag-happy-birthday","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/593"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24807,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24804\/revisions\/24807"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/toy-story-2-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n