In the course of the film Andy and his toys develop in different ways as he passes on to a further stage in his life, understanding that his old, somewhat battered, deeply faithful companions are best cared for by a younger generation. Toy Story 3 achieves the same results by showing Andy moving towards an emotional maturity. The earlier films bring lumps to the throat by evincing a conventional nostalgia for childhood but without resorting to characteristic Disneyesque sentimentality. The dogged Woody comes to the rescue, but before all is resolved there are chases and cliff-hanging escapes, and Buzz is first reprogrammed as a militarist and then as a dashing, Spanish-speaking gallant. Also present at Sunnyside and cleverly used are a reunited Barbie and Ken, the former very amusingly becoming a liberated woman, recognising the preening Ken's limitations and giving a speech reminiscent of the founding fathers. He's turned the daycare centre into a penitentiary run by the convicts, a parody of a Hollywood prison film, as chilling as Dickens's Dotheboys Hall or Pinocchio's Pleasure Island. Lotso, a tragic-comic figure, has become an emotionally twisted sadist as a consequence of thinking himself abandoned. This place is ruled over by the apparently benevolent, strawberry-scented Lotso'Huggin'-Bear (Ned Beatty), who's accompanied by the mute Big Baby, and the tone suddenly gets seriously dark in the manner of Dead of Night and Child's Play, where the dolls are possessed by evil spirits.
All except Woody are sent to the Sunnyside Daycare Centre, which they regard as total rejection. Andy decides to take Woody with him and put the other toys in the attic. It's set on the eve of the 17-year-old Andy's departure for college and sees him clearing his room for his little sister. The truly wonderful Toy Story 3 completes a trilogy. (Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, once threatened to sue Disney over the film but eventually thought better of it.) In the even better Toy Story 2 (1999) we have the theme about kids getting tired of their early nursery favourites, and there is some remarkable satire when Woody is kidnapped by a ruthless dealer in vintage toys and his mates come to the rescue. In that early episode, which began a new classic era of animation, the devoted cowboy Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), representative of the Old Frontier, is challenged for supremacy by the astronaut Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), boastfully confident avatar of the boldly-going New Frontier, who doesn't believe he's a toy. The charming, semi-abstract whimsicality of Day & Night puts us in the right mood to encounter for the third time, and in unobtrusive 3D, the toys we first met in little Andy's nursery back in 1995. The pair mime their challenges and at the end come to accept their happy, complementary roles. Within the outline of each two-dimensional figure we're shown 3D images of the world in sunlight and moonlight, of Las Vegas neon-lit by night and under blue skies by day. One, it transpires, is the surly Night, the other the cheerful Day. Two amorphous, asexual creatures – like cartoon ghosts – confront each other against a flat, black background. In this case it's the delightful, five-minute Day & Night, directed by Teddy Newton, who worked on The Incredibles, Ratatouille and the magnificent Pixar short Presto, which accompanied Wall-E. A s always, the generous gang at Pixar films offer excellent value, starting with the usual bonus of an animated short as a curtain raiser for the feature.