Pixar

Toy Story 3 does what the third (and should have been final) installments of the Godfather and Star Wars trilogies couldn't: it put a proper bookend on a longer story. This presumably final visit with the toys that launched Pixar as a feature-film company in 1995 is not quite as good as the first two movies as a caper, but it is the most emotional of the three movies.

For those of us who have grown increasingly appalled at the idea of Avatar winning Best Picture -- pick your excuse: horrible dialogue, 2-D character development that is subordinate to the 3-D action, the truly discomforting idea that these big blue people are all fine and one with nature, but a white guy pretending to be one of them becomes their chosen one, or whatever he was -- there is some good news.

Pixar has never talked down to its audience, but with its recent string of films, Pixar has begun talking up to its audience. Much faith is invested in the ability of the audience to connect with a story rather than a concept. Based on the box office take, it's working.

Wall-E is a film, not an animated movie, the first in the computer animation genre to make that leap. Imagine the balls it took to make an animated movie that has almost no dialogue throughout, and barely a word spoken for 45 minutes, while other companies are paying millions for Ben Stiller's voiceover as if that is somehow a sound business decision let alone artistic one.