Famously, following the runaway success of Toy Story, Disney had intended for its sequel to be a direct-to-video affair, as was its custom at the time. Then as production progressed they thought it was so good that it would be given a cinema release instead. Then John Lasseter and the Pixar team thought it was nowhere near good enough and so reworked the whole thing in a very short timeframe. (And in amongst all this, someone accidentally deleted the film from the network and it turned out the backup system hadn’t been working, only for a single animator who had been working at home to say she’d made a copy of the whole thing a few days earlier and therefore save the day.) Then it got released and everyone thought it was a masterpiece.
The great Randy Newman forged an unlikely second career for himself in the wake of the first film and for a while he was house composer at Pixar. His blend of wonderful orchestral technique with genuine heart and sincerity proved to be the perfect musical core of the studio’s extraordinary run of one great film after another back in those days and his plan for Toy Story 2 was clear: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, so more of the same.
The centrepiece is the magnificent song for the new character Jessie the cowgirl, “When She Loved Me”, written for a flashback scene as she remembers her owner playing with her, growing up and losing interest. Probably the saddest song ever written for a kids’ movie, Newman himself wasn’t sure he could pull it off. He pulled it off.
I vividly remember watching this film with a friend in a cinema in 1999. Apart from us, the cinema was full of young kids with their parents. There was much shouting and screaming, throwing of popcorn etc. Then the “When She Loved Me” sequence started. All the kids fell silent. As it went on, tears began to flow. To this day, I have never seen anything like it.
I think it’s the best song Newman’s ever written for a film: his gentle piano accompaniment to Sarah McLachlan’s pitch-perfect vocal performance, the aching strings that tentatively provide movement underneath, it is a rare achievement. As a songwriter he has always been a vivid storyteller and of course in a literal sense that is what his movie songs do as well, but there’s something that feels really personal about this one and it’s no wonder that he said he was very proud of it.
The other two songs may not quite be that, but “Woody’s Roundup” – performed brilliantly by the old-fashioned western group Riders in the Sky and serving in the movie as the theme song for the old tv show where the character originated – is great fun; and while it’s fair to say Newman did not enjoy the experience of working with Robert Goulet, there’s no doubting that the hilarious Vegas glitz he brings to the arrangement of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” for Wheezy the Penguin to sing at the end of the movie is quite brilliant.
As for the score, it does what all the great sequel scores do: brings back everything people loved about the first one, and adds great new elements. The brilliant space music for Buzz Lightyear in the opening cue “Zurg’s Planet” is a hoot, and Newman at the time noted that “I finally got to write like Johnny Williams.” He returns to the sound later in “Emperor Zurg vs. Buzz” – the variation on the heroic Buzz fanfare from the first score is really nicely woven through both cues. There’s also a great new western theme in “Woody’s Dream” which gets a spectacular outing in the action-packed finale “Jessie’s in Trouble” and some lovely tender Americana in “You’re a Star” and even more so in the very sad “Off to the Museum”.
The best cue – arguably not just of this score but of Newman’s whole, formidable body of work for Pixar – is “The Cleaner”, written for the memorable sequence when Woody gets made as good as new again so he can be sold for megabucks. Not attempting to disguise its inspirations, it’s a balletic, Russian-flavoured piece of wit and beauty.
As with the films the music was written for – there’s absolutely no questioning the brilliance of the first one – yet somehow the second is even better. Chock full of memorable tunes, the score is an absolute blast from start to finish – and with that incredible song as well, this is genuinely great.
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