A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

SUNNYSIDES: Allow me to be Wikipedia for a moment, so that I can disambiguate. Sunnyside is a wonderful book by Glen David Gould, which, as I mentioned a few threads back, is both riotously funny and occasionally heartbreaking. It takes its title from Sunnyside, the Chaplin two-reeler, which in Gould's telling is a schizophrenically ambitious and distracted piece that Chaplin finished in a rush for reasons I won't spoil, should you make the wise choice to read the book. Chaplin's film, in turn, half-accidentally appropriates the name Sunnyside from the estate where Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford first fell in love.

Toy Story 3 is out today. I hope to see it soon (Rotten Tomatoes gives it the rare 100% rating), but haven't yet. That means that all I know of the plot is what I've read in the papers. If you've been avoiding the papers, stop now, because I'm going to mention the broad outline.



In Toy Story 3, Andy, the toys' loving owner, goes off to college. The toys are shipped off to a day care, which at first seems idyllic, but then turns menacing.

The day care center's name is Sunnyside, and I don't think that's coincidental. From Lasseter on down, Pixar is filled with people who view themselves as heirs to the Hollywood canon, and they take their lineage seriously. The use of a name like Sunnyside is almost certainly a reference to old Hollywood, and it may even be a nod to the formation of United Artists (which Chaplin formed with Fairbanks, Pickford, and D.W. Griffith shortly after Sunnyside), whose founding as an artists-first independent studio predicted Pixar's later rise. Pixar's movies are filled with allusions, many throwaway, but some purposeful, like the nod to stop-motion monster auteur Ray Harryhausen in the sushi bar in Monsters Inc., or the cameo of Disney animation legends Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in The Incredibles just as Disney acquired Pixar as a corporate entity and Pixar effectively acquired Disney animation as a creative one.

So it's hard, really hard, not to read institutional analogies into the very plot of TS3. The Toy Story franchise, after all, is as closely associated with John Lasseter as any movie is with any artist. Lasseter made the first TS over a constant hum of skepticism from the industry and instantly (or as instantly as something can be that takes a half-decade to create) turned Pixar from a technology supplier and occasional ad contractor into a Hollywood gorilla (and technology supplier). Legend has it that Pixar made TS2, one of the most acclaimed animated films of all time, only to defend Lasseter's beloved characters from a cut-rate Disney-produced sequel (Disney owned the characters); there are some suggestions that the same kind of protectiveness explains why Pixar stuck with Disney rather than forging an alliance with Fox. Lasseter's office is famously crammed with Pixar toys, but he also maintains (or at least maintained, last time I was there) a large trophy case brimming just with counterfeit knockoffs of Woody and Buzz. Those two dolls are Lasseter's toys, not Andy's.

TS3 essentially was launched as a result of, and amid the consummation of, the Disney-Pixar merger. Lasseter is not directing it -- he's too busy running Disney Animation, Pixar, and Disney's theme parks -- but he co-wrote it and turned it over to Pixar veteran Lee Unkrich (who co-directed TS2). I know nothing of the development of TS3, but how could its creators have been thinking of anything but Lasseter's graduation to greater corporate responsibility, and the loss of his ability to play with his toys, when they wrote Andy into college? And how could the ominous Sunnyside day care be anything but a manifestation of Pixar's (read: the toys' own) fears of being trapped within Disney's soulless, creativity-deadening corporate bureaucracy? I don't know how TS3 ends -- if Andy saves the day like Lasseter did by ensuring Pixar's independence in the merger. I do find it fascinating that one can -- can, not must -- see what will certainly be one of the most popular children's movies of all time as the first corporate roman-a-clef.