By Peter T. Chattaway

THINGS are always slow at the multiplex between the Christmas and summer seasons, and the last few weeks have been slower than most.

So instead of focusing on whatever the newest releases happen to be, I’d like to look ahead just a little – to the release of Toy Story 3, which comes out June 18. And I would especially like to touch on how, with this film, Pixar and its playthings seem to be coming full circle.

By that, I do not mean simply that this film will hark back to the original Toy Story – though it will almost certainly do that, too.

Rather, it seems to me that Pixar is going all the way back to its roots, and to its Oscar-winning short film Tin Toy, in particular.

Tin Toy, which came out in 1988, was about a toy one-man band who is fresh out of the box; he gets chased all over the living room by a drooling infant or toddler.

The child in question is often shot from low angles to emphasize how he must appear to his toys – as a looming, threatening, Godzilla-like monster.

The success of Tin Toy, which was the first computer-generated cartoon to win the Oscar for Best Animated Short, helped pave the way for Toy Story – which came out in 1995 and was the first feature-length film to be completely animated on computers. And that was followed just a few years later by the even funnier, even more moving Toy Story 2.

The films revolve around a group of toys who belong to a boy named Andy. In the first two films, he was only eight or 10 years old; but now, in Toy Story 3, he’s all grown up and ready to go to college.

His toys are accidentally sent to a daycare, where they are used and abused by a giddy, destructive and utterly clueless mob of preschoolers – children whose behaviour bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the child in Tin Toy.

That’s an interesting parallel in and of itself, but even more interesting, I think, is this: It has been 15 years since the first Toy Story came out, so you could say that we have seen Andy grow from boyhood to adulthood in real time.

And since Tin Toy came out several years earlier, I like to think that the baby in that short film is actually Andy when he was just an infant.

The Toy Story movies have played very strongly on the notion that Andy loves his toys. But it is worth remembering that even he, too, was once little more than a blind force of nature; even he, too, was once a toddler who posed some sort of threat to his toys. Things change. People change. And the love that people have for things changes as they grow.

No doubt there’s a lesson or two in that.

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Several films have been based on the fantasies written by C.S. Lewis and his colleagues (more on that in a minute), and a few films have even been made about Lewis himself – most notably, the two rather different versions of Shadowlands. But so far, no one has yet made a fantasy film in which Lewis himself is one of the protagonists.

That could soon change, though. The Hollywood Reporter says Travis Adam Wright, a co-writer on the sci-fi paranoia flick Eagle Eye, has been hired to write a script based on James A. Owen’s Here There Be Dragons – the first in a projected series of seven novels in which C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and other characters are the heroes of a fantasy adventure that inspires them to write the books that made them famous.

I have not read any of Owen’s novels myself, so I cannot say what sort of spin they put on the life and thought of Lewis and his fellow Inklings.

As I understand it, though, these stories do not depict Narnia or Middle Earth – both of which are copyrighted – but instead show Lewis and Tolkien interacting with the mythologies of much earlier eras.

Speaking of Narnia, 20th Century Fox is beginning to ramp up its promotional efforts for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which will come to theatres just before Christmas.

The filmmakers have already begun showing clips from the film to various Christian ‘opinion makers,’ and they have been very keen to assert that they learned their lesson on Prince Caspian – a film that underperformed at the box office and disappointed many fans as well. From here on, the filmmakers say, they will be more faithful to Lewis’ novels.

The thing is, no less an authority than Douglas Gresham – a co-producer of these films and Lewis’ step-son, to boot – said only a few months ago that the filmmakers had not only made substantial changes to the Dawn Treader storyline, but that these changes were even less justified, in his opinion, than the changes to Prince Caspian.

Oh well, in seven months we’ll all get to see what the fuss is about for ourselves.

– filmchatblog.blogspot.com

May 2010