Animation
Toy Story 5 (PG)
Review: The age of toys is over. That dire proclamation, issued by discarded playthings whose human children have become zombified slaves to digital tablets, rallies Jessie (voiced by Joan Cusack), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and Woody (Tom Hanks) back into action in a heartfelt fifth chapter of the franchise that launched Pixar in 1995. Toy Story 5 contemplates the impact of electronic devices and online chat rooms on the mental wellbeing of young children through the lens of a rootin’ tootin’ adventure that teaches new tech old tricks about teamwork.
Jessie fills the void left by Woody as the new sheriff of Bonnie’s room. The cowgirl rag doll is devoted to the wildly imaginative eight-year-old (Scarlett Spears) and encourages playtime with physical toys, assisted by deputy sheriff Buzz, whose hardware gets pleasantly warm every time he thinks about Jessie. The status quo in Bonnie’s bedroom is disrupted by the arrival of a frog-shaped Lilypad computer tablet (Greta Lee). The girl’s parents hope the device will help their painfully shy child make friends in the neighbourhood. As if by magic, Lilypad connects Bonnie to members of her dance class and the tykes spend countless hours together, staring at and swiping their screens.
Bonnie loses interest in Jessie and co and the sheriff sends out an SOS for reinforcements. Woody answers the call, having seen first-hand how toykind is being forgotten. “Toys are for play but tech is for everything,” he laments to Jessie over walkie talkie. Once reunited, Bonnie’s toys orchestrate a daring plan to loosen Lilypad’s grip, which inspires a madcap cross-country adventure to befriend a horse-loving eight-year-old called Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) and a fragile toy-tech alliance with three neglected, battery-powered gadgets: talking GPS hippo Atlas (Craig Robinson), toilet training gizmo Smarty Pants (Conan O’Brien) and digital camera Snappy (Shelby Rabara).
Toy Story 5 is an exceedingly polished and entertaining sequel that addresses timely concerns with a light touch. Nothing in Pixar’s toy box can approach the emotional devastation of the finale to Toy Story 3 but a script co-written by Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris peddles the studio’s trademark blend of humour and lump-in-throat sentiment with confidence. It’s easy to take Pixar’s boundary-pushing artistry for granted but animators showcase a striking new aesthetic to visualise Bonnie’s playtime. In fantastically melodramatic sequences including a wedding interrupted at the altar, characters are rendered as a delightful mish-mash of crayons, chalk and felt tip pens as if Bonnie is drawing her imagination for us in real-time.
Cusack’s vocal performance is deeply moving as Jessie saddles up to bid farewell to her third human child and co-stars offer effervescent comic relief, particularly O’Brien’s chatterbox training tool. It’s been a seven-year wait since the fourth film and Stanton and Harris’s picture feels incredibly relevant. The toys are back in town and they are playing to win both hearts and minds.
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Drama
Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day (12A)
Review: Rigid societal expectations of early 20th-century London threaten to extinguish the inner light of a headstrong young woman in director Tina Gharavi’s handsome adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel. Written for the screen by Justine Waddell, Night & Day looks to the stars in the company of a spirited and self-taught astronomer, who repeatedly clashes with an academic fraternity that actively dissuades women from challenging the status quo.
Katharine Hilbery (Haley Bennett) is determined to further her scholarly ambitions at the University of Cambridge but the application requires a sponsor. Her father (Timothy Spall) won’t oblige. He believes a woman’s place is tending the house and he encourages Katharine’s sweet-natured poet friend William Rodney (Jack Whitehall) to propose to his daughter. “Women are at their kindest when they are engaged,” chuckles the patriarch to himself. Katharine rejects William’s advances and dresses as a man to attend a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society with her cousin Cyril (Misia Butler). The male-only membership votes overwhelmingly against women joining the fold.
Katharine begrudgingly acknowledges she may need to marry to further her ambitions so she accepts William’s proposal and establishes a make-shift laboratory at a suffragette printing press run by women’s rights activist Mary Datchet (Lily Allen). The planets appear to align, then Mr Hilbery hires writer Ralph Denham (Elyas M’Barek) to edit the hulking 600-page manuscript written by his wife (Jennifer Saunders) to honour her poet father. The one thing that Katharine cannot rationalise as a mathematical formula – her fluttering heart’s desire – is a black hole that could swallow her dreams.
Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day is a measured call to arms for female empowerment, peppered with affecting directorial flourishes. When Katharine issues a primal scream of frustration in the confines of her room, the screen cuts to an exploding star. A chase on four wheels through cobbled streets quickens the pulse thanks to the brisk editing of Hansjorg Weissbrich and Ben Wilson. Bennett is a supernova of steely determination, raging against the patriarchy with an impressive English accent. She refuses to heed the warnings of scientific trailblazers such as Lady Margaret Huggins (Frances Barber), who publish under their husband’s name rather than have no voice at all. Whitehall is sweetly endearing and he provides a steady trickle of comic relief, reflecting at one point the perils of penning poetry about a mallard (“Fortunately, quite a bit rhymes with duck!”)
Composer Simon Goff’s synth-laden score is hauntingly effective and pleasingly anachronistic, almost as out of step with the era as Katharine herself. “We are born in the wrong century,” Cyril heavy-handedly informs his cousin. Scenes of homophobic abuse double down on the injustices of Edwardian England. In a little over a century, not much has changed.
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