Toy Story

Behind an unassuming storefront on West Read Street, clowns and animals cavort freely while prim and proper Victorian ladies and gentlemen look on. A "50s Chevy sits ready to pull its silver trailer cross-country, while music school benefactor George Peabody gazes sternly from a darkened corner. And a game of pingpong waits to get started. For eight years, Anne Smith's Antique Toy Museum has sat quietly at 222 W. Read St. on the outer fringes of Mount Vernon, housing a vast trove of mostly late-19 t h - and early 20 t h -century playthings.

The "Toy Story" trilogy is a primal suburban growing-up story. The movie's screenwriter, Michael Arndt, whose father was in the foreign service, grew up in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. "We moved there when I was 4 or 5 years old, then went to Sri Lanka for two years; then I went to junior high and high school in McLean, right near the Potomac River. To paraphrase Sarah Palin, 'We could see Maryland from our front porch!' " Now Arndt may become the first screenwriter to go two for two at the Oscars.

"Toy Story 3" is a prison break movie — and prison break movies have always juggled laughs and jolts. A Newsweek writer has raised the question of whether "Toy Story 3" is too frightful for small children. But children have always loved to be scared, whether by reading fairy tales or watching "The Wizard of Oz." As screenwriter Michael Arndt says, "There's nothing wrong with strong emotions — you go to a film to feel strong emotions. And the only time that doesn't work is if the emotions are cheaply earned or are made gratuitously.

"Toy Story 3" is a prison break movie — and prison break movies have always juggled laughs and jolts. A Newsweek writer has raised the question of whether "Toy Story 3" is too frightful for small children. But children have always loved to be scared, whether by reading fairy tales or watching "The Wizard of Oz." As screenwriter Michael Arndt says, "There's nothing wrong with strong emotions — you go to a film to feel strong emotions. And the only time that doesn't work is if the emotions are cheaply earned or are made gratuitously.

The "Toy Story" trilogy is a primal suburban growing-up story. The movie's screenwriter, Michael Arndt, whose father was in the foreign service, grew up in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. "We moved there when I was 4 or 5 years old, then went to Sri Lanka for two years; then I went to junior high and high school in McLean, right near the Potomac River. To paraphrase Sarah Palin, 'We could see Maryland from our front porch!' " Now Arndt may become the first screenwriter to go two for two at the Oscars.

"Toy Story" is such a big hit on video that Disney has just released "Tiny Toy Stories" ($9.99).It's a collection of five whimsical short subjects -- one an Oscar winner -- from Pixar studios, which created "Toy Story." All are done in the same three-dimensional computer animation style.Actually, "Tiny Toy Stories" is a sort of history of computer animation. The first film, "The Adventures of Andre & Wally B," is from 1984. It was probably ambitious for its time, but it's only a couple of minutes long and seems slight today.

Mr. Potato Head -- the first toy ever to be advertised on television -- made his big screen debut in the new Disney film, "Toy Story."The toy -- a plastic potato with removable eyes, nose and ears -- isn't the only Hasbro product to appear in the computer-animated movie.The film, about a roomful of toys that come to life, also features such Baby Boomer favorites as Battleship, Candy Land, Mousetrap, Parcheesi, Life, Scrabble and Tinkertoy."We think it's a wonderful film and we think it will increase sales of our core brands," said Hasbro spokesman Wayne Charness.

It's where the toys are.It's toy meets toy, toy loses toy, toy gets toy.It's the toy from Ipanema or at least Pixar Inc., a sub-contractor of the Walt Disney Company.It's "Toy Story" and if you don't sit there bleeding bliss, exhaling pleasure, gliding on happiness and sucking down the nectar of delight, make a note to yourself never to go to the doctor's again because he'll have to tell you that you're dead.Who'd have thought it?Certainly not this critic, who attends most screenings in a pique of high cynicism, convinced all movies are guilty until they prove themselves innocent.

Is a second Golden Age of animation upon us?In a year when "The Iron Giant" was tragically overlooked by family audiences and "Pokemon: The First Movie" was giving Japanese animation a bad name, here come two movies that prove once again how ingenious, artful and flat-out entertaining animation can be. In radically different ways, "Toy Story 2" and "Princess Mononoke" bring the art form back to its roots as a medium meant for for general audiences, not...

For many adults, toys are just overpriced plastic things they consider buying only when their children begin to vigorously test their diaphragm capacity in a department store.But few adults pay as much attention to toys as John Lasseter.In Mr. Lasseter's office at Pixar Animation Studios in Richmond, Calif., toys line the shelves, and many of them were there long before he began work five years ago on "Toy Story," the first fully computer-animated feature. "The main reason to do this film," says Mr. Lasseter, "was so during work hours, I could go to a toy store and buy toys on the company credit card."

Behind an unassuming storefront on West Read Street, clowns and animals cavort freely while prim and proper Victorian ladies and gentlemen look on. A "50s Chevy sits ready to pull its silver trailer cross-country, while music school benefactor George Peabody gazes sternly from a darkened corner. And a game of pingpong waits to get started. For eight years, Anne Smith's Antique Toy Museum has sat quietly at 222 W. Read St. on the outer fringes of Mount Vernon, housing a vast trove of mostly late-19 t h - and early 20 t h -century playthings.

Toy Story and Toy Story 2 **** ( 4 STARS) You shouldn't pass up a chance to see them in 3-D. "Toy Story" is a buddy movie, with cowboy raggedy-doll Woody and sleek Space Age action figure Buzz going through the roughhouse version of getting-to-know-you familiar from "48 Hrs." and "Lethal Weapon." "Toy Story 2" is warmer and harder to classify. It's an ensemble comedy about several unexpected matters, including Woody discovering his show-biz roots - and his "inner cowboy" - and Buzz soldiering on through a hall-of-mirrors-like experience similar to the one John Malkovich endures when he goes into his own brain in "Being John Malkovich."

LAKE BUENA VISTA, FLA. JOURNEY THROUGH HALLOWED GROUND Capital Books / $20 Instead of spending Presidents Day weekend skiing or off at a spa, why not brush up on your U.S. history? This book charts a 175-mile historic driving trip from Monticello in Virginia to Gettysburg, Pa. Most appropriate is the "presidential journey" part of the tour, which takes readers to the homes of several presidents including Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. And though Camp David is closed to the public, the book recommends stopping at the nearby Cozy Restaurant, which has an exhibition about the presidential retreat.

John Lasseter, the creative chief and top director at Pixar and Disney Animation, long ago proved that he can create timeless fairy tales with insects, in the fractured Aesop's fable A Bug's Life (1998), and with toys, in Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999). He extends his reach in Cars, an ultracontemporary comedy-drama about the perils of careerism and speed for speed's sake. Now 49, Lasseter rooted this tale of a racing wunderkind who gets his comeuppance in his own recent experience.

Animation has always been a tip-of-the-iceberg art in which seconds of finished work represent weeks of thought and labor. Ever since he put Toy Story into production, John Lasseter, the reigning genius at Pixar and the new chief of Disney animation, has infused that arduous process with joy and a love for movie heritage - even as he's taken cartooning (in the words of Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear) "to infinity and beyond." For anyone who's followed Pixar closely, everything Lasseter has been saying in the wake of Pixar's sale to Disney - about the culture of Pixar being more important than its economics - rings as true as a church bell.

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. -Steve Jobs, chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios, stunned the Walt Disney Co. and Wall Street last week by abruptly ending negotiations with the Burbank, Calif., entertainment giant to extend one of Hollywood's richest relationships, one that has produced five straight hit films. Disney executives and many independent financial analysts said Pixar was demanding too much, including sole ownership of the films the two had made under the existing pact, such as the Toy Story series and Monsters, Inc. But sources close to Eisner and Apple Computer Inc. founder Jobs said the stunning split was less about the math of the deal than about the personalties involved.

The best film of the year, the most fully realized, the most adroitly balanced between technique (considerable) and narrative (thunderous) and delight (intense), was "Toy Story." Who'd have thought it? Not I, said the critic, who expected a festival of product placement and a platform to sell a new line of Disney plush toys.The film demonstrated anew the oldest of lessons: that story still matters and that story is really the only thing that matters.It was really an epic as vast in scale as "Star Wars" or "The Searchers" or "The Pride and the Passion."

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. -Steve Jobs, chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios, stunned the Walt Disney Co. and Wall Street last week by abruptly ending negotiations with the Burbank, Calif., entertainment giant to extend one of Hollywood's richest relationships, one that has produced five straight hit films. Disney executives and many independent financial analysts said Pixar was demanding too much, including sole ownership of the films the two had made under the existing pact, such as the Toy Story series and Monsters, Inc. But sources close to Eisner and Apple Computer Inc. founder Jobs said the stunning split was less about the math of the deal than about the personalties involved.