Which isn't to say that it's perfect: it's probably the least brilliant of the series, opening with a shameless rip off of its own predecessor's prologue and meandering wildly in its middle act while it tries to find the well-worn groove of the Rescue Mission Movie the prequels so successfully reinvented. Fortunately by the time it settles down to a structurally flawless finale that had me laughing and crying snot all over the woman in front of me, its minor faults are easily forgiven.
And while Big Baby and the cymbal-banging monkey would have scared the Lincoln Logs out of me as a kid and Mr Potato Head's new look was the funniest thing I've seen at the cinema since Toy Story 2, there was one criminally underused star of Toy Story 3:
What I don't need now, though, is any more sequels from Pixar. All their films are so carefully designed to take their characters in a perfect arc that it feels like a waste to go back to them, even though Toy Story 2 and 3 were so good. So while I look forward to 2012's Brave, I can't get excited about next year's sequel to the Pixar film of which we do not speak, or the following year's Monsters, Inc 2. A Mr Pricklepants movie, on the other hand...
I had to watch Toy Story 3 in 3D because I won the tickets in a competition at London's Barbican. Like every film in existence, there was no need whatsoever for it to be in 3D. Which meant that I sat there wearing what felt like a giant pair of swimming goggles which didn't fit over my glasses properly and cut out half the light from the screen so I could barely see anything in the gloomier scenes FOR NO REASON. In fact Mrs The Incredible Suit got so fed up she took them off altogether and watched it in perfectly bright fuzzyvision.
We thought we were being clever by taking along the 3D specs we were forced to buy at the Odeon the other week but guess what? They weren't compatible with the Barbican's projection system. Which makes Odeon's trumpeting of their green credentials by celebrating the fact that you can re-use their glasses pretty hollow when every other chain is cranking out more tons of plastic for their own systems.
I really, REALLY hate 3D.
