‘Toy Story 3′ made me feel … something

That way lies madness. And the incinerator.

When a movie mines nostalgia and sentiment as aggressively as “Toy Story 3″ does, it’s almost impossible to evaluate on its own terms. So here are four momentum-killing paragraphs of context.

1) I saw the first “Toy Story” with my friend Corey in 1995, when I was 11, at a shitty old multiplex in a shitty old shopping center near my house. The movie struck a couple chords with me then — the value of embracing differences, mostly, as I was privately coming to terms with my fabulousness at the time. When my mom bought me “Toy Story” on cassette months later, I went to sleep watching it dozens of times, wishing that my stack of Genesis cartridges had even half as much personality as the movie’s selfish cowboy and deluded spaceman.

2) By the time “Toy Story 2″ arrived in 1999, some of my friends had declared themselves too mature for animation. That wouldn’t stop me. I saw the movie at a brand new, technically superior chain theater across town and loved it to pieces. Something about how man’s quest for permanence warps his perspective … or not. All I knew then was that it was heartfelt and exciting.

3) I’ve enjoyed and celebrated every entry in the Pixar canon since, but nothing resonates with me today like those two do. Maybe because they’re the best, or maybe because they were first-ish (I wasn’t cynical enough in 1998 to appreciate the hard edge in “A Bug’s Life”).

4) I entrusted my two dogs to my mom (you could say “abandoned” or “gave up,” and you wouldn’t be wrong) in 2007, when I decided I was too cosmopolitan for Pennsylvania and fled to the San Francisco Bay Area for five benighted months. It remains the worst thing I’ve ever done to any living thing, and even though I got one of the dogs back (and another one since — a black Labradoodle whom I love just as dearly), I regret that decision every day of my life.

Fast forward to Friday, when I watched “Toy Story 3″ by myself at precisely the same geographical coordinates where I saw the first one. That old multiplex had been demolished and recently replaced by a larger, ostensibly better one, though it has to be one of the most poorly managed movie theaters I’ve ever been to. Lovely facility and equipment, but careless projection, shitty speaker placement and the same gang of rowdy fucks who endeavor to ruin every other movie house in America.

Put another way: the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? That’s one of several existential dilemmas at the heart of “Toy Story 3,” the first family-friendly animated feature to stare death in the face and shudder.

Andy, the doe-eyed kid from the first two movies, has grown up in real time. He’s 17, packing for college and largely done with his kid stuff, which has been consigned to a dusty eternity in the attic or endless torture at a nearby daycare center. The toys, still led by Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), are split up, reunited, split up again and re-reunited at the daycare, where they hatch a plan get back to Andy’s house before he leaves for school. They’re enslaved, beaten up and nearly atomized in the process, and though the peril occasionally is played for laughs, it just as often isn’t.

“Toy Story 3″ insists that mortality is a thorny and scary thing. Time runs out, and when it does, ugh.

Granted, the movie ends happily, and it’s as exuberant and hilarious as it is harrowing. From the introductory action beat, which brilliantly recalls the first five minutes of the first movie (“Well, I brought my dinosaur, who eats forcefield dogs!”), to the forgivable treacle in the film’s final moments, “Toy Story 3″ is dangerously smile-inducing. There’s a moment about halfway through the film that fleshes out its villain — a strawberry-scented teddy bear — with more sincerity and style than any big-screen comic book adaptation has managed. The movie also riffs on some of the best moments from “The Godfather,” the De Palma “Mission Impossible” and the “Ocean’s” films, with an inside-out bank robbery-esque sequence as imaginative and elaborate as any I’ve seen.

The action and comedy here complement the message, rather than dilute it. That’s fortunate, because there are other elements that threaten to muddle things.

See, we’re talking about toys. Period. They’re funny, emotional, magical toys who spring to life when their owners aren’t around, but in the film’s fiction, they’re still … things. There’s no real-life analogue for the connection between Andy and a toy like Woody, who loves his owner with unflinching, dead-serious dedication. Given that so much of “Toy Story 3″ hinges on our understanding and appreciation of that relationship, it’s not always clear how we’re supposed to feel.

But you’re going to feel anyway, because the movie taps in to something old and elemental and important that you’ll remember vaguely but won’t be able to identify, no matter how old you are. “Toy Story 3″ is about family, but not in the way “The Incredibles” is. It’s about accomplishment, but not in the way “Up” is. When the toys finally grapple with the fact that they won’t be around forever (you’ll know the precise moment when you see it), you feel bad about their predicament, but you envy the truthful, unshakable attachment they have to the world and to each other.

It’s about that, I think. And the effect is so broad, inclusive and unspecific that, by the end of it all, you’re just happy to be alive and experiencing things right now. You’ll want to go hug your best friends right now.

The original “Toy Story” holds up remarkably well, artistically speaking, but stacked against its creators’ newest work, it feels somehow flat. Not bad, in the way first-generation PlayStation games look today. Just visually simple. “Toy Story 3″ feels at once familiar and cutting-edge; lived-in and fresh. There’s something remarkable about the depth of field here, even in two dimensions (I was up-sold to 3-D when I had to give up my 2-D seat to a handicapped kid; the enhancement is marginal). Colors pop when they should and fade when there’s more important stuff to look at; the animation and computer models, key to so much of the movie’s character, are absolutely top-notch. This is easily Pixar’s most technically accomplished film to date.

But much more than that, “Toy Story 3″ is a life-affirming piece of art that reminds you about the wonderful, sensitive creatures in this world, and how fiercely you should protect them when you find them. I was cheerful and devastated as I drove home, and when I pulled into my driveway, I gave my dogs — my dogs, which will be part of my decision-making calculus for as long as they live — the biggest hugs they’ve won from me since I crawled back from California.

Not because I was reminded of the finite time I have left with them, but because they’re mine and I’m theirs and we depend on each other.

If that sounds ridiculous, well, you haven’t seen “Toy Story 3,” and I feel sorry for you.