Tin Toy (1988)

Overrated

Admirable film.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Although some of their features/short films are better than others, anything by Pixar by my standards is worth watching. Tin Toy is one of their early efforts, and while not one of their best short films like Geri's Game or Presto it is definitely worth watching. The animation is not terrible, but their more later efforts had a more sophisticated look. There are some nice colours, and Tinny is beautifully done with dead-on facial expressions, but fluidity is lacking at times and the baby is more scary than cute. The music is beautiful though, there are a few amusing moments amidst the more compassionate tone and the characters are engaging with Tinny being one of the Pixar title characters I identify most with. Overall, definitely worthwhile, but Pixar have done better in my view. 8/10 Bethany Cox

"Tin Toy" is a simple short with only two main characters. A little tin toy band member that walks around and plays the symbols is the protagonist, and the destructive little baby is the antagonist. It's a simple story that follows the very childlike statement that "You don't want something unless someone else does." and vice versa.A little tin toy is lonely. A baby crawls into the room and the tin toy can't wait for the baby to play with it. Soon it finds out this baby is a destructive force, tearing apart and drooling on everything it sees. The tin toy has several changes of heart which end in a bit of a twist ending.This is one of Pixar's earliest shorts, and the animation is far from perfect. It doesn't have the fluidity seen in their later productions, but you can't blame them, this was '80s computer animation. One thing that Pixar has kept over the years it's their perfect way of portraying emotion. Just through little movements of the face, they give great emotion, which is what this short relies on, as there is no dialogue. It's a good and sweet natured short.My rating: *** out of ****. 5 mins.

This Academy Award winning animated short is about some little toys and their efforts to avoid a very rough and drooling baby. While the story is very simple, it's quite funny and worth a look--especially if you want to see what old-school CGI looks like.If you see this film today and know nothing about the history of computer generated animation, then you will probably not be all that impressed. After it all, while entertaining and cute, you may focus on just how ugly and unrealistic the baby is in the short film--not realizing just how much effort it took to make this ground-breaking film. You must realize that all this was made before the Windows operating system was available. There were no Pentium processors--nor even 486 processors. Heck, even the ancient 386s were too new to have been of much use to the Pixar folks. Instead, this was the product of huge computers with rendering software developed by Pixar on whopping big computers. This was also years before their first full-length film, TOY STORY. Technology-wise, it was just a short jump from Pixar's first releases, such as LUXO JR. or RED'S DREAM. In light of all this, then this animated short is brilliant and deserving of great praise. Give this one a look!

I still think cartoons, or "animated short features" as some call them, should be funny, unless you know in advance you are going to get a "message," such as moral one or a politically- slanted oneI say that because many of these modern-day cartoons seem to be concerned with showing how clever they can be instead just plain "yuks," if you will. I am not knocking this particular effort: it's certainly different, but it wasn't that funny. If anything, at times, it was almost scary, at least if you sat and openly rooted for the little toy soldier which, I presume, we all did. It certainly showed how little babies, in their youthful ignorance, can be a little too rough with things. Ask your little dog or cat, if you have any doubts. What was very well done to me were the camera angles and facial expressions that made this little baby almost look like a terrifying Godzilla-like monster. I guess he would look like that if you were a little toy and were human. Babies can play rough! I don't know if we needed a "cartoon," however, to illustrate that fact. All of us already know that, don't we?Yes, this was "clever," but give me Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Felix The Cat or Pink Panther cartoon any day, something that will make me laugh out loud. Save the "executed brilliantly" and "gives us a wide range of emotions" movies to the feature films.