Labour of love

Toy Story 3
U, Nationwide

The third and final film in a franchise isn’t usually up to much, but not so with Toy Story 3. It may even be cinema’s first must-see sequel to a sequel. It is wondrous and a delight and because those deliriously talented people at Pixar obviously love these characters to death, then so too do we. In fact, it’s the only press screening I’ve ever attended where everyone stayed right to the very end of the final credits, presumably because the characters were still chatting away in a frame to the side, and no one wanted to leave them behind; no one wanted to say that final goodbye to Woody or Buzz or Jessie or Slinky Dog or Mrs Potato Head, who, in the five years since the last movie, may have had work done on her nose. It certainly looks at a different angle on this outing. Usually, critics don’t hang about although, I suppose, I should say that the exception is always the Observer’s magnificent Philip French, who never shifts until the house lights come back on, and who may have this thing called ‘integrity’. I would like integrity and even tried it once but, alas, it gave me a headache and also didn’t go with anything else I had to wear. I’ll probably try it again at some point in the future, but thought I’d leave off until the autumn, when I might buy a coat to set it off properly. Obviously, it would have to be navy.

Integrity. And this film has it in spades and bus-loads and buckets and anything else you can put integrity in bar taupe. (Integrity has never looked good in taupe.) Here, Pixar do everything that DreamWorks should have done with Shrek 3 and didn’t.