Toy Story 3 anticipation thread

i remember being absolutely disgusted by uncanny valley stuff in the toy story movies. so long since i've watched them i can't remember if a dog was one the problems. Seem to remember the humans being horrific.

Are you joking? Uncanny valley is where they try and do photorealism but fail because it's slightly off. The humans in TS are cartoony, not photorealistic.

i found them deeply creepy and grotesque as a child and they are disgusting in the same way that harryhausen's skeletons or the terminator exoskeleton crawling after sarah connor is - both things i've always thought of as uncanny valley.

Also They were fairly realistic as far as computer graphics were concerned at the time.

to be honest i found them more perturbing than either of those examples.

yes, but you wouldn't nearly mistake the characters in any pixar movie for actual humans, right? OK if you don't like the design but that's nothing to do with the uncanny valley effect.

So I bought this book at Target, for my kids, and unless I'm mistaken, it completely spoils the whole movie! I'm not usually a very spoiler-averse person, but this seems like a massive marketing fail, releasing this book months before the movie. Maybe the real plot of the movie will be different, but I doubt it.

yes, but you wouldn't nearly mistake the characters in any pixar movie for actual humans, right? OK if you don't like the design but that's nothing to do with the uncanny valley effect.

the uncanny valley concept as posited by masahiro mori includes bunraku puppets as falling within the uncanny valley.

http://asobi.info/noriko/archives/04021044_1.jpg

You're not exactly likely to mistake them for people; but they're somewhat too human-like not to be creepy: exactly like the humans in toy story.

Bunraku puppets use actual human movements iirc. That's why you'd perceive them as moving in a way very similar to humans' movement. You may perceive Pixar's characters as moving in a way that mimics human movement but if you compared it to a character using motion capture (eg Polar Express) you'll notice a huge difference. If you can find a clip of what you mean I'd be interested to see it.

Schwantz: a quick browse on Amazon throws up several books that seem to give away the entire plot (from what I can tell from "look inside"). Marketing fail indeed!

Yeah, Toy Story not in the Uncanny Valley. Polar Express and that Scrooge movie last xmas (both by Zemeckis) are all sorts of Uncanny Valley.

umm, ok, it's decided, this totally unspecific and vague area of human-like movement/appearance which is experienced subjectively by individuals as discomfort or uneasiness does not apply to anything in the Toy Story movies because you like them.

Yes, that is exactly what I said. Study one Animation 101, or give me an example.

yeah pixar don't give a fuck about copyright and they'll be hundreds of videos on youtube i'm sure.

You may perceive Pixar's characters as moving in a way that mimics human movement but if you compared it to a character using motion capture (eg Polar Express) you'll notice a huge difference

did i miss the meeting when we decided that anything less lifelike than Polar Express was automatically not in the uncanny valley?

As mentioned upthread, the humans in the Toy Story films are too cartoony to be included, and pretty much everyone but you would agree. Sounds like you get creeped out too easily.

Like, you must have HATED The Incredibles, then.

To be fair, maybe that's what ppl look like in Glasgow

guys, I was talking mostly about this
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/5162/oldbuster.jpg

Though some of the human stuff weirded me out at times, but usually it was when they were large up close shots where you saw someone's moving arm or shoulder, not so much the faces - the camera effects and motion of the body parts was a little too realistic looking at times. Harder to get a good clip or screenshot of it though.

My point is that after TS2, I noticed in future Pixar films they deliberately avoided uncanny valley-type designs, animations, and post-processing effects (I missed A Bug's Life though, so I can't speak for that one).

now imagine seeing that dog IN 3D

I agree that the human characters look kind of horrible, particularly 15 years on - although they look like visions of heavenly loveliness compared to Pixar's Tin Toy from 1988:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNZtl5SZvbM

btw, the voice of Andy is the same guy as the first two movies.

andy and sid look pretty bad in toy story one. pixar went for more cartoony forms with real people in toy story 2. I'm not sure why they didn't do that in 1; wasn't the old man playing chess in the park done around the same time as toy story 1? maybe it came after....anyway he's in toy story 2 as well. as soon as they moved away from super-real human forms they looked better.

anyway I've seen 1 and 2 innumerable times now because I have a toy story addicted 4 year old; I have to have seen them both at least 50 times. Toy story 2 is a better film.

Toy Story 2 is probably my least favorite Pixar film. Don't get the love. The first one is tops though.

Oh shit, forgot about Cars. Both on the same level imo.

I've seen TY1 countless times for similar reasons as akm, and it's amazing how it refuses to really ever bore me like most movies would have after the millionth viewing. Part of the reason must be that it's a lean 82 minutes or so iirc.

Bug's Life had zero uncanny valley moments, unlike its evil Dreamworks competitor film, Antz. Did I need to know what Sharon Stone and Woody Allen look like as Ants(z?)? No.

http://thecia.com.au/reviews/a/images/antz-2.jpg

compare:

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/090521/Bugs-Life_l.jpg

bugs life used to be one of my faves but I find it pretty dull these days. but it looks great.

Fun trivia: they made the ants pink & blue to avoid it being a racial allegory.

btw guys, I am way excited for Toy Story 3. I cried at the freaking trailer.

i was kind of shocked that andy would be pulling the same crap that jessie's owner did but the longer trailer makes it clear this isn't the case

There's a schmaltzy bit in the US trailer (I think they didn't include it in the UK trailer) that made me doubt the kick-ass-ness of TS3, but I think that's the only openly emo bit so don't let that put anyone off.

I loved the first two films but the trailer for 3 didn't really sell it to me. Mr spacecadet claims not to like the first 2 films even though he hasn't seen them!"£! so if I do make him see this in the cinema and it's no good I'll never hear the end of it.

I wish they'd do the 3d-remastered double bill of the first two over here but I guess we're not going to get it. Then again, we got Up 6 months after the US, so maybe they'll do the same for TS3 and throw us the double bill to keep us sweet while reading Americans go nuts and then forget about TS3 on the internet.

I'd say for the last 10-15 films I've seen at the cinema, I noticed they picked the worst bits for the trailers - to the extent that I wouldn't have gone if not for ppl going as a group and persuading me to come. It's usually all the really obvious jokes or cliched dialogue, but when it's in the context of the movie it works. Is this just me and/or have they always done this?

Anyway, if you liked the first two films, I can't see how you couldn't like the 3rd. The new characters are great, although it's a shame that because there are so many a lot don't get much screen time (this is probably wise in terms of making a decent film, but I wanted to see more of some of them). It's in the UK only a week later, on the 23rd.

Btw I just realised this wasn't on the thread:
http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/04/27/and-now-the-vintage-japanese-commercial-for-pixars-lots-o-huggin-bear/

no one's seen it yet? reviews are pretty incredible, sf chronicle (mick lasalle, who I take with a grain of salt most of the time) ranking this with (and above) Wall-E and Up.

i just saw it. it was absolutely super awesome.

scary for a G film, though.

great ending to the series. very, very funny, and also quite sad in places.

Just got back from this, it was really good! My wife bawled like a baby. Makes a genuinely nice bookend to the series. I think this is one of those ultra-rare trilogies where each succeeding film is as good as, if not better than, the previous one.

fuck pixar and their fascist sentimentalist humanist agenda.

http://rlv.zcache.com/other_than_that_mrs_lincoln_t_shirt-p235618705881393765trlf_400.jpg

Wall-E demonizes post-humans as fatties and equates plucky humanoid courage as what a robot should aspire to. What kind of message is this sending to the youth?

While we applaud Pixar's use of non-organic objects as protagonists in their films, we find it appalling their habit of making these objects human-like or "cute". Why not make a film about a truck being itself?

Like Milo and Otis, but 100% more entertaining.

http://www.arclight.net/%7Epdb/nonfiction/uncanny-valley-1.gif

the big scary climactic moment of this was genuinely unsettling. i remember on the tim burton alice in wonderland thread, there was an argument about whether or not it was realistic to expect a disney movie to really make you fear the characters aren't going to make it out alive. this movie totally delivered on that front.

it was surprisingly intense in parts, reddening otm about the climax. raises the emotional stakes very effectively. tightly plotted. but to nitpick, humor was somewhat lacking, and what it had tended to rely on stereotypes, i.e. doesn't Ken act gay, isn't it hilarious to see Buzz as a Latin lover-type? kinda retrograde.

I like to credit the admirable parts of Pixar films to Pixar and the lesser parts to Disney.

xps, er yeah? I saw it several weeks ago which is how I was able to say how fantastic it was (and with genuinely scary bits). Seeing it again today, too!

AV Club review talks about that climactic moment, and this was definitely something that stood out to me.
"effeminate Ken" I thought was actually a cheesy joke handled with a decent amount of affection - it could have been horrible in the hands of other studios.

humor was somewhat lacking, and what it had tended to rely on stereotypes, i.e. doesn't Ken act gay, isn't it hilarious to see Buzz as a Latin lover-type? kinda retrograde.

wasn't how i read the film at all. and come on: mr. potato head as a tortilla was super funny.

OTM - Mr. Tortilla Head got HUGE laughs in our theater.

Also, is it wrong that I thought Jessie's slo-mo glamour shot when Buzz gets onto the conveyor and sees her was kinda hot?

well, yeah, Mr. Tortilla Head was funny. And the way they played with these stereotypes for comedic purposes was a lot less abrasive than most entertainment that trucks in this sort of humor. Funnier too. Still, to take a character like Ken, who's a known gay icon, then to make him straight then play the stereotypical gay-seeming parts of his personality for lolz is-- well, if not disappointing, then at least underwhelming.

I haven't seen you posting in a while. Am I reading the wrong threads?

nah, I gave it a break for a while, work picked up. but the urge to make nitpicky points about a movie I liked perfectly fine was overpowering.

The little short film at the start of this is an amazing bit of animation – the best Pixar short yet, IMO.

TS3 was as good as I expected it would be.

yeah also this ^^ although I was more weepy at Andy's mum being all 'my son is gone' and the BIT WHERE ANDY AND BONNIE PLAY WITH THEIR TOYS LIKE OMG ACTUAL CRYING YOU GUYS

hearts of steel

I watched Tokyo Story yesterday and that absolutely pwned Toy Story 3 in the emotional outpour stakes.

I was absolutely sullen for like half an hour. You would like it LJ, I think.

did anyone spy any toy story characters in the wall-e junkyards?

I bet it didn't have a moment like 1/4 as funny as Tortilla Potato Head xp but yeah I might watch it

Yes it is sombre as fuck. I give, lots of belly laughs like that Shakespearian hedgehog and SPANISH BUZZ.

spanish buzz was next-level for about 20 seconds, which is enough

That hedgehog killed me! Especially since it was wearing little lederhosen.

bonnie's toys were about as charming a bunch of toys as Pixar could have engineered, I was all 'squee'

"we do a lot of improv here."

I'm not one for stuffed toys. But the peas-in-a-pod are the CUTESTTTTT!
ahem.

what a totally wasted opportunity not to get Tom Waits to be the voice of Chuckles The Clowm

also that short at the beginning was probably the most spectacular piece of animation I've seen since Ren & Stimpy

For the all the makes-grown-men-weep hype I didn't find the sad parts particularly sad - I think partly cos grown-up Andy is kind of a tool. Up was far more heartwrenching. Still a really really good film though.

This is why I'm a valuable poster. I find this sort of depraved silliness just before everyone else.

http://i30.tinypic.com/9s4inl.jpg

Trying to work out whether Spanish Buzz or Metrosexual Ken was the best thing about this.

http://i31.tinypic.com/2l95zlj.jpg

Serious Actor Doll was the best imo

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_O-_F30rZ2lA/TFBVXvNFLGI/AAAAAAAACHg/F6QT_7cK97U/s320/Mr+P2.jpg

^^^^you can take all the uranium you want if it's to build a truth bomb^^

Trying to work out whether Spanish Buzz or Metrosexual Ken was the best thing about this.

I liked the monkey myself.

Okay, so the store I work at sells this like $150 huge Buzz Lightyear toy that talks and does all sorts of fancy stuff. There's a display of it, so I hear kids pushing the button to make him talk like 1000 times a shift. Anyway, one of the random lines is Buzz doing the Spanish thing. Except its not from the movie, instead it is the most offensive, racist fake Spanish accent I've ever heard.

For the all the makes-grown-men-weep hype I didn't find the sad parts particularly sad - I think partly cos grown-up Andy is kind of a tool. Up was far more heartwrenching. Still a really really good film though.

Same here really. In my case it might be because I never held any real great lasting affection for my own toys in the first place. I got rid of them fairly quickly, and painlessly, when I grew out of them. I did like the film, and the ending though.

So a couple of people spent two years making a shot-for-shot live action version of Toy Story. Real human characters using the Toy Story toys to remake Toy Story. Something deliriously meta about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G0j_Huv2Fg

ok the unified theory of pixar thing was lol but this i TOTALLY buy - http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/02/25/toy_story_andy_s_mom_has_a_secret_identity_look_at_the_hats.html

ha, pretty good. very believable

just read that unified theory of pixar, hilarious!!