Jeremy’s Tophunder №61: Toy Story

6 min readMay 10, 2020

The first thing you’ll notice if you re-watch Toy Story in 2020 is that it’s a lot shorter than you’re expecting it to be. Like, a lot shorter.

I mean, in general, movies geared towards kids end up with shorter runtimes than most movies, and Pixar is no exception. Most have runtimes between 90–105 minutes, and the -longest- Pixar movie is Incredibles 2, which doesn’t even clock two hours (118 minutes). Toy Story is the shortest movie in the Pixar catalog.

81 minutes. You don’t even get an hour and a half.

Somehow in just 81 minutes, Pixar revolutionized animated filmmaking forever. DreamWorks Animation, which got its start just slightly after Pixar, seems to have been greatly influenced by what Pixar was doing, and their debut film, Antz, might as well be the same movie as Pixar’s sophomore effort A Bug’s Life. In part, that is because it might well have been stolen intellectual property by DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who prior to founding DreamWorks was the chairman of Disney’s film division, where A Bug’s Life was being developed by Pixar. DreamWorks had a few traditional animated features (The Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, Sinbad, and Spirit), but by 2004, they were exclusively making computer-animated features. Disney’s non-Pixar animation took a little bit longer to come around, but with movies like Tangled, Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph, Zootopia, and Moana, they’re clearly moving into that market as well. The last traditional animation effort that got any traction was The Princess and the Frog, which came out in 2009. Prior to that it was probably Lilo & Stitch, which came out in 2002. Traditional animation has all but disappeared from the major studios.

I’m not sure how much I like that. Sure, Pixar makes great movies, with great animation, and they occupy four spots on my Top 100 list, but I sometimes feel wistful for the style of animation that I largely grew up with — like Beauty & The Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Mulan. Frozen and Moana are similar stories, but they still feel different because they look different.

But, Toy Story deserves a lot of credit not only for spearheading digital animation, but for introducing us to a world that was so substantially different from anything we had seen before in animation. There are humans in the story, but they aren’t the main characters? It opened the door into a world of imagination that had never been explored before — what happens to your toys when you aren’t around? The premise of Toy Story is probably the most compelling thing about it.

It also established a depth of character that felt noticeably different from what Disney had done. Woody didn’t feel one-dimensional. He simultaneously wanted to selflessly bring joy to Andy, but also selfishly not be usurped by Buzz. Meanwhile, Buzz experiences a rather visceral existential crisis, realizing that the identity he thought he had was in fact not real. But they’re layered into a story about the secret life of toys, so they seem facile and insignificant. They were subconsciously preparing kids about the realities of growing up: When you realize that you aren’t the center of attention anymore. When you realize that the world you thought you knew actually mostly just a game, and now there are bigger, more serious obstacles. When you realize that accepting your place in life and making the best of it is sometimes all that you can do. These are all moments that we all inevitably encounter, and they’re key turning points in most of our lives.

There a few common themes that runs through all Pixar movies, but the most obvious, as far as I can tell, is the triumph of teamwork over individualism. Every Pixar movie has a protagonist with a reasonable amount of crankiness, who either suddenly or gradually develops a conflict that needs to be solved, and while they want to go it alone, over the course of the movie they learn the true value of friendship and teamwork. Oftentimes, it involves the main character under-estimating the value that their companion(s) bring to the table. Obviously, this theme isn’t unique to Pixar movies — you can pick 15 great movies at random, and most of them will probably have some element of one character not wanting the help of another character, only to realize later that they do, in fact, need help. The difference with Pixar is how often this theme shows up, and how front-and-center it is. And it all started with Toy Story. Much in the same way that Iron Man set the tone for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, intentionally or not, for better and for worse, Toy Story did the same for Pixar.

I love Pixar movies. I really do. Over the course of doing this project, I’ve come to realize that (a) there aren’t enough Pixar movies on my list, and (b) the Pixar movies that made the cut probably aren’t high enough. I don’t want to spoil future entries, but I’ll just say that I left off Wall-E, all of the Toy Story sequels, Up, and Monsters Inc. In retrospect, I’m mad at myself. I’m not sure if all six of those deserved to make the list, but a few of them probably should be included. It’s kind of the nature of the beast, though. A big piece of the process was the initial realization that I probably had 60 movies in my “Top 20,” and probably 200 movies in my “Top 100.” I just love movies. But once you draw a cut-off line, certain things are going to be left out. It’s inevitable. Unfortunate, but inevitable.

Toy Story isn’t my favorite Pixar movie, but it’s undoubtedly the most important, and probably the most iconic. Whether you’re talking about the movie or the franchise doesn’t matter all that much — it’s clearly the first thing people will think of when you mention Pixar. You could even make a decent argument that Woody and Buzz are the two most iconic film characters of the last 25 years, or at least the most recognizable. When Empire put together a list of the 100 greatest film characters of all time (and the list doesn’t totally suck), Woody ranked №82, which is a bit lower than I’d put him, but the respect deserves respect. I have Toy Story as my third-favorite Pixar movie, which I think is correct. I have it as my 61st-favorite movie of all time, which I’m not quite so sure about. It might deserve to be higher. But I locked in my list when I started, and I’m sticking with it for the time being, so №61 is going to have to be good enough, at least for now.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One