I really do hope this is the last one. Toy Story 3 has a scene where young Andy (voiced by John Morris) is emptying his childhood bedroom, preparing to leave for college, and his mother sees the bare floor and walls and is overcome with emotion. And we remember right in that instant that this very bedroom, back in 1995, is where we as moviegoers first met Woody the cowboy (Tom Hanks), Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and all their joyfully neurotic toy friends; but also where we first met the animation company Pixar, and the whole concept of a fully-digital animated film.

For a long time, Toy Story was the only world Pixar re-visited, the only movie in its acclaimed roster to get a sequel. That is about to change, with the likes of Cars and Monsters, Inc. now set for the franchise treatment. Andy’s departure as a grown-up young man could truly mark the end of the first generation of Pixar – no longer a rambunctious start-up but the industry’s dominant creative and financial institution.

Their latest film finds them re-trenching on safe ground after more daring spectacles like WALL*E and Up. For much of its running time it is charming, it is imaginative, and it is beautifully rendered by the artists, who take full advantage of the resources purchased by 15 years’ success without violating the aesthetics established by the episodes made in more primitive times. We meet new toys, and enjoy some fast-paced laughs and thrills. But it feels mostly like a succession of gags and adventures featuring characters we already love rather than anything urgent or fresh. It’s only in its ending that Toy Story 3 becomes a very good story, and I will talk more about that in a moment.

As it opens, Andy’s mother (Laurie Metcalf) is insistently broaching the uncomfortable topic of what to do with his toys. Few of them remain, and they have lain unused in his toybox for many years. Woody, devoted Woody, believes that, as Andy’s toys, their mission is to always be there for him should he ever want to play with them again, and if that means a life in the attic with the Christmas decorations, so be it.

But a series of mishaps both drives a wedge between Woody and the other toys, and sees them inadvertently donated to the Sunny Side Day Care Center. To Buzz, Jessie (Joan Cusack), Bullseye, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (Don Rickles and Estelle Harris), Rex (Wallace Shawn), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), and Slinky Dog (veteran character actor Blake Clark, subbing for his late friend Jim Varney), it has the look of a toy’s paradise – endless play with an eternally-renewing supply of children. A Barbie Doll belonging to Andy’s little sister Molly (and voiced by The Little Mermaid herself, Jodi Benson) has arrived with them, and at last meets a Ken (Michael Keaton). Sparks fly at Ken’s Dream House.

Of course there is much more to Sunny Side and its folksy alpha toy, the plush Lotso Huggin’ Bear (Ned Beatty), and soon pleasures give way to toy-scaled terrors. I am not sure which Sunny Side denizen is creepier – the baby doll enforcer with the droopy eye, or that cymbal-clanging monkey in the security room. And so our heroes, with Woody’s help, scheme an escape that involves such inspirations as exploiting Ken’s wardrobe fetish and (you must see to understand) bringing a tortilla to life. Buzz, as he often does, finds himself in personality conflict.

Things turn far more perilous than you might guess – by the end these toys are facing real literal death, and doing it with an amazing kind of courage. The makers of Toy Story 3 have not forgotten that we bond with these characters through their suffering. Even its villain is seen as not born bad, but as someone who was wounded deeply by a misfortune that could befall any toy, and nursed his anger about it until it changed him.

Toy Story 3 is enjoying incredible success right now in a disappointing summer at the multiplex, and I am sure there will be immense pressure to capitalize on the possibilities for future sequels inherent in its emotional ending. I believe that the ending is rather extraordinary, but only if you see it as the true conclusion of the story.

Here is why: this has always been the story of Woody, and his attempt to pierce the mystery of the life of a toy – like so many he strives to understand how best to fulfill the purpose of his existence. First he helped to teach Buzz, as they went from rivals to best friends and Buzz discovered he was not a real Space Ranger, about the virtue in inspiring the imaginations of children, and starring in their play. Then, in the even more provocative and moving second film, he was essentially forced to acknowledge his own mortality – and chose the finite joy of being Andy’s plaything, knowing at any time he could be abandoned or forgotten or destroyed, over immortality as an ever-preserved but never-touched exhibit in a toy museum.

This third film shows the bill from that choice coming due, and the screenplay, by Oscar-winner Michael Arndt (writer of Little Miss Sunshine), achieves poignant release because it once again finds Woody making a devastating choice, one only he can make. How could you produce a Toy Story 4 after this? Toy Story 3 shows Woody achieving true enlightenment within the toy philosophy – and with no lessons left that need learning, we should respect his maturity by letting him go. We’ll always have that bedroom.

P.S.: While the feature Toy Story 3 might not represent a risk on the part of Pixar, it is preceded by an animated short, Day & Night (directed by Teddy Newton), which is ecstatically radical. It is more of an experience than a plot, personifying and contrasting the sounds and rhythms and activities of light and dark on Earth in a way that is so conceptually tricky yet dumbfoundingly simple that I will leave you to be astounded by it for yourself. I saw it in an audience of children who were captivated into silence – they understood immediately. It carries a beautiful message of understanding and embracing that which is not like us, and as a final means of underlying its point, does so by marrying Pixar’s trademark 3D brilliance with…old-fashioned 2-D hand-drawn art. An absolute triumph.

The Polar Express
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writers: Robert Zemeckis and William Broyles, Jr., based on the book written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg
Producers: Steve Starkey, Robert Zemeckis, Gary Goetzman, William Teitler
Featuring the physical and vocal talents of: Tom Hanks, Michael Jeter, Nona Gaye, Peter Scolari, Eddie Deezen, Daryl Sabara, Isabella Peregrina, Jimmy Bennett

Maybe it’s that the warm and inviting illustrative paintings of Chris Van Allsburg never should have moved, or talked. Or maybe it’s that the simple story, a wisp of a fable, was not the stuff to support a 100-minute movie. This problem also plagued Ron Howard’s bloated and horrifying adaptation of Dr. Suess’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Or maybe it’s that the “performance capture” technology used to put human movement and spirit inside animated figures is still so new that its power to entrance is not yet readily within grasp.

Whatever the reason, and it may be parts of all the above, this feature adaptation of holiday classic The Polar Express, while imaginative and frequently arresting, is too inconsistent to be honored in my memory with the same fondness I hold for the book. It is usually my philosophy that adaptations of books must be treated as movies first, and criticized on their own terms, but the filmmakers have labored so mightily to bring what we love about the book to life, it is difficult to ignore where it falls short.

If any filmmaker today could have shown themselves equal to the task, Robert Zemeckis would have. One of the best working in Hollywood’s big-budget mainstream, he has always managed to put groundbreaking technology at the service of his story, from the poetic light shows of Contact to the virtuoso computer-aided camerawork of the final third of What Lies Beneath, maybe the most riveting high-gloss treatment an old-fashioned ghost horrorshow ever got.

But here his grip is remarkably slippery, and you can tell by the wildly shifting moods. Simple wonderment is only to be found in fits and starts, more often we are careening from sinister weirdness to frantic whimsy to noisy roller-coaster action to strained sequences of artificial peril – are we really to believe our hero is going to simply fall to his death 30 minutes in?

The hero in question, who is decidedly not going to fall to his death, is an unnamed boy living in an average suburban household. It’s Christmas Eve and, though tucked into bed, he’s got one skeptical eye open towards his door. Since last year he has grown to suspect that, however those presents are getting under the tree, it’s certainly not by way of a magical elf dropping through the chimney.

But then, a great rumbling is heard outside his window, and suddenly out of the fog a great steam train roars down his street, and a kindly but stern Conductor is beckoning him aboard this thing he calls The Polar Express.

The Conductor looks and sounds like Tom Hanks, as do many of the other characters, including the boy’s father and a mysterious hobo hitchhiking atop the train. By wearing a motion capture suit, Hanks and other actors including Nona Gaye, Peter Scolari and the late Michael Jeter acted out the movements of their characters on a bare stage. Another series of captures was done for facial movement, then voices were recorded.

They do not always match so obviously as with the Conductor – in the case of our hero child, Hanks performs the body movement, Daryl Sabara of Spy Kids provides the voice, and a child actor named Josh Hutcherson provided additional movement and facial acting.

Hanks pulls so much duty that this is clearly as much a labor of love for him as for Zemeckis, but in this case I must unfortunately judge it a miscalculation. What we love about Hanks is that we recognize certain core qualities in him in every role, he is not the type of physical or vocal technician to be able to make a digitally-created character pop to distinctive life like Andy Serkis did with Smeagol/Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. And so we see or hear something familiar and think “hey, it’s Tom again”, and suddenly we’re outside of the illusion.

The journey to the North Pole, where our hero will face his doubts and decide once and for all if he really believes in this Christmas thing, has many moments of charm. Much after the fashion of the Harry Potter stories, our boy now has some companions, a strong, confident girl and a boy with self-esteem issues, to be exact. The boy (body: Peter Scolari, voice: Jimmy Bennett, facial work: Hayden McFarland) in particular seems beaten down by the idea of Christmas. We sense from his slumped posture and look of quiet perpetual fear that there’s great pain in his life, and the movie is sensitive enough to give us only hints, as the details of his particular sorrow are not the point.

The point is that this is a journey of faith, embodied by the gift our hero chooses in the movie’s climax (the canvas truly opens up in this last third, and the sights are stunning to behold). The journey often has the feeling of a dream, where experiences fold in to one another with their own impenetrable logic, and half-complete symbols hint at an understanding which may or may not eventually come.

This is right, I think, the book always had a dreamlike quality that suggested it was all part of the boy’s own process of grappling with his beliefs. And I’ve always liked my childrens’ stories a little eerie and enigmatic, the North Pole here has some distinctly Willy Wonka-ish touches. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about technical details in this review, and that this movie’s look is so unique to the eyes is important; but I think it also is the key to its ultimate undoing. We are so forcefully wowed by the color and motion that the journey loses some fundamental sense of mystery or even choice. By the time our hero decides he believes in Christmas, we’re wondering, having seen all the eye-popping sights he has already seen, what took him so long.

The Terminal
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story by Andrew Niccol and Sacha Gervasi
Producers: Laurie MacDonald, Walter F. Parkes, Steven Spielberg
Stars: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride, Diego Luna, Barry Shabaka Henley, Kumar Pallana, Zoe Saldana

One of the dangers of The Terminal, Steven Spielberg’s slight but irresistibly sweet little trifle of a movie, is that you can want too badly for it to be Saying Something. It’s true that, in the story of innocent well-meaning Eastern European Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), who finds himself forced to live for months in the international terminal of a New York airport, words like “fable”, “allegory”, and “microcosm” do apply.

But to focus on that while watching the movie is to miss its many charms, which lie not in its symbols but in its very recognizable, very human quirks. One woman seated near me chuckled at the appearance of a Dept. of Homeland Security logo, like it was meant as some kind of sight gag about the relative intelligence of the security personnel. But that shortchanges the character of Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), who runs the security detail at the terminal.

In a lesser movie he would have just been the villain, a simple, scowly killjoy, well within Tucci’s range and willingness to ham things up. If you watch carefully, though, you’ll see that little aspects of his inner life are still revealing themselves up to his very last scene. This is not some incompetent autocrat, this is a man who finds comfort in a system of rules and is actually very good at his job, but finds himself alternately bamboozled, confounded, charmed and frustrated by Viktor Navorski’s refusal to behave like the cynical sneaks his system is designed to deal with.

In one scene he offers Navorski a way out: simply say that he has a fear of returning home, and he can be welcomed onto US soil as a refugee seeking asylum. But Navorski cannot lie; how could he fear his home? Dixon is flummoxed, grabbing for anything he can use to plug into the proper form – “But aren’t you afraid of something?”

“I am afraid for…ghosts,” Navorski offers helpfully.

The simple quirk of an unfailingly trustworthy man bumping up against a world built around mistrust is mined time and time again for laughs by Spielberg and Hanks, who have created in Navorski a Holy Innocent. One can imagine this character with his own series of two-reelers back in the silent era, unwittingly putting one over on the establishment in situation after situation simply by being his own direct self.

It is a sign of a great performance when you look at an actor, especially a movie star, and you start thinking of them as their character and not themselves. When I laugh at The Terminal, it’s not because I am thinking – Boy, is Tom Hanks funny. It’s because Viktor Navorski just did something funny.

Here he arrives in New York on a mission that he does not divulge eagerly, but involves a nearby Ramada Inn and a battered Planters Peanuts tin he carries everywhere. Unbeknownst to him, there’s been a military coup in his home country of Krakozia, and the United States has not bestowed any kind of recognition on the new government. His passport thus invalidated, he cannot enter the United States, but neither can he leave, again because he lacks a valid passport. This was inspired by the actual story of a man who has now lived for well over a decade in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, just in case anyone finds this too precious to be true.

And so the weeks go by, and Navorski builds himself a nesting place, gets a job, becomes well-acquainted with the food court’s many options, and starts touching the lives of the little community that keeps the airport humming. He brokers a romance between a meal cart driver (Diego Luna) and the security officer for whom he pines (Zoe Saldana). He pierces through to the secret sadness that fuels janitor Gupta’s (Kumar Pallana) misanthropic pranks.

He finds himself continually bumping into, first accidentally, more often later by design, a harried flight attendant named Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones). She’s a woman uncomfortably facing the expiration of her youth, and her own destructive romantic tendencies (especially her inability to end an affair with a married man), but, as with everyone else in the movie, something about Navorski makes her stop for a minute, and see everything a little more clearly.

Zeta-Jones, both in her performance and the way she’s shot, is a little jarring, a little too manipulative Hollywood. She swans into scenes with gauzy close-ups, breathy emoting, and over-emphatic music, and puts an uncomfortable tarnish on Spielberg’s charming bauble. It’s really a shame, since on paper her character is perfectly conceived, an intrusion of real-world messiness into Viktor’s simple philosophy. And it does comes to a conclusion that, for this movie, is just right.

This airport terminal is a living, breathing place, an extraordinary set designed by Alex McDowell to accommodate the jungle of walkways and escalators, and the stores travelers have become so familiar with – Brookstone and Starbucks and all the rest.

Spielberg’s regular cinematographer since Schindler’s List, the brilliant Janusz Kaminski, sets his camera free in this space and once again provides beauty wherever it is asked of him. Even the sight of mustard squeezing through the holes in a cracker (Navorski must subsist on condiments before he finds sources of revenue) has a certain colorful perfection to it. His fluidity in providing a distinctive visual compliment to every type of story Spielberg has told in the last decade has played no small part in the quality of this phase of his career.

In the end, it’s a beautiful, unforgettable airport, where weddings can take place, a famous diva’s underthings can become the high-stakes prize in a poker game, and stories can quickly spread about one man’s good deeds. But it is still just an airport. Spielberg, so confident with action and science fiction, has here achieved the same faith in his abilities in a far more delicate genre. It’s a human comedy, rarely forced, calibrated to pull laughs from you at the most unexpected moments, and at the last, indelibly touching.