Just Saw Toy Story 3!

It is past 1 a.m, so I'll post more on this tomorrow, but what I will say right now is that the movie is excellent. It's superb. It's a great ending to an incredible story. I laughed many times and got teary-eyed at the end. Saying goodbye to characters you love is like saying goodbye to old friends.

But now, I'm turning on the A.C., reading a little, and going to sleep. Like Ken said to Barbie (spoiler-ish, verbatim-ish)--"I'll see you in my dreams."

Except it's funny when he says it. It's creepy when I do.

This Makes Me Want to Die...

What a beautiful view...from the inside.

...of happiness. It also makes me drool. It also compels me to write heroic couplets:

To drool and yet to die. Yea, the longing
to be amongst the din with pen drawing.

What am I talking about? The tour of Pixar Animation Studios from the Pixar Blog (very delayed...backblogging!). Both of the inside (you have to look at it, since there's a picture of Nick Pitera (yes, that guy) who works at Pixar) and of the outside. They also have pictures of the new construction going up.

Oh, and additionally, Toy Story 3 just raked in $41,000,000 on opening night. Wow.

And one more thing, it scored a 99% of official reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. That gives it the second highest ranking in the history of the site behind...wait for it...Toy Story 2.

Something Left, Something Taken

Cool video, including After Effects animation, traditional animation, and puppetry, courtesy of Drawn!

Something Left, Something Taken from Tiny Inventions on Vimeo.

This Was Their Finest Hour

Seventy years ago today, Winston Churchill announced to the British people that the Battle of France was over and lost and that the Battle of Britain was about to begin.

"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties," the prime minister said, "and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour."

Toy Story 3 - The Big Day!

Toy Story 3 opens today, and to celebrate that, here are two excellent articles from Slate:

A review of the film ("Toy Story 3 is the best Toy Story of them all")

and

an article/slideshow on why John Ratzenberger is in all the Pixar films.

Anatomies of Cartoon Characters!

Courtesy of James Gunn--what a brilliant idea!

By South Korean artist Hyung Koo Lee:

Bugs Bunny

Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey, and Louie

Tweety Bird

Goofy

Tom and Jerry

Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote

Sketches by Michael Paulus:

Snoopy

Lucy

New Design (...or something like that)

Apparently, during the span of my absence, blogger decided to make a fun easy-to-design template widget. I'm playing with it, but given that I'm not on my home computer at the moment, the changes I have made are but a work in progress. Bear with me.

You Know, It Kind of Does...

Toy Story 3, Toy Story 3, Toy Story 3!

Few things excite me like Pixar movies.

OK, nothing excites me like Pixar movies. And, from what I've heard, Toy Story 3 will justify all that excitement.

Trilogies always worry me, since they can either be brilliant or deplorable. For example, Star Wars (the originals, thank you very much) was done well, even if Ewoks vs. Empire is one of the stupidest battles of all time (oops! Forgot this one!). The character arcs were complex, deliberate, and smooth. The Matrix, however, was a confusing blather that ended with the Gerber baby crucifying Neo...or something like that. The hype is that Toy Story 3 is more the former than the latter.

The brief synopsis of the story is that Andy--eight or nine years old the last we saw him--has grown up and is getting ready to go off to college. Like many of us (especially those of us who are overly sentimental about everything), he has kept all of his toys to this point. However (again, like many of us), he doesn't really play with them any more. As he packs up for school, he decides to take Woody with him as a memento from childhood. The other toys will be placed in the attic--maybe for his children someday, maybe because he can't bear for them to go. However, he packs them in a garbage bag, which his mother accidentally throws away, not realizing that he wanted them kept. By some means, they all end up at Sunnyside Daycare, a seeming paradise that turns out to be more of a prison. They have to get out and return to Andy--but how?

Ultimately, the plot revolves around one theme: learning how to remember the past while being willing to let go of those you love. I was looking at the book The Art of Toy Story 3 yesterday in Barnes & Noble, and just seeing the concept art and understanding the story made me want to cry. Apparently the writer (Michael Arndt, who also--go figure--wrote Little Miss Sunshine), upon completing the final scene, walked out of his office at Pixar with tears streaming down his face. You see, Toy Story 3 isn't just our chance to be entertained once again by Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the gang; it's also our chance to appreciate how far their friendships have come, to remember how much we've been through with them, and, ultimately, to say goodbye. This is, after all, the last installment.

Reading through that book made me reminisce about that wonderful and terrible (paradox!) feeling of saying goodbye to my family when I went off to college. There's something big happening, symbolically and emotionally, as you cut the bonds of childhood. It's frightening and exciting. It makes you want to celebrate and cry. I think that's what Toy Story 3 is going for, and if I know anything about Pixar, it's that they can toy with my emotions as effectively as Wayne Rooney can handle a soccer ball.

That all said, I thought I'd post a few clips and a cool NYTimes piece that were recently released as we prepare for June 18, opening night!

Meet the new characters!

Hello again, world!

Yeah, so, I've been MIA for many moons. In that time, I haven't blogged about all the things I've been doing and seeing and whatnot, from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado to pre-prohibition ('old-fashioned') cocktails to my new computer tablet (!!!--not to be confused with 'tablet computer').

That said, I'm back on line and will hopefully do some backlogged blogging ('backblogging'?) soon.