The first Toy Story addressed identity -- understanding your role in life, the strength of your place in it, and accepting it. Toy Story 2 addressed obsolescence -- knowing that your role will one day run its course, but choosing to embrace it anyway. So naturally Toy Story 3 is about that end -- reaching it, and having a very primal reaction when it's finally upon you, no matter how much you had prepared for it. It's about letting go, or to put it more bluntly, death.

What's that, you say? This is too dark a subject for one of the delightful Toy Story movies? Well, that's really the beauty of it. Toy Story 3 is indeed delightful. On the surface, you have everything you could ask for from the possibly final entry in the series -- another adventure with Woody (voice of Tom Hanks) the pullstring cowboy and Buzz Lightyear (voice of Tim Allen) the space ranger action figure. There's plenty of comedy, lots of new characters, movie references galore, and moments of suspense in action set pieces, all delievered with amazing computer animation, glorious color, and in 3-D, if you choose to see it that way (I did not -- I'm already tired of 3-D). If you go in expecting just that good time, you will get exactly that.

But for me, the greatest strength of the Pixar films has been what rumbles just beneath their glossy shells. And still I wasn't prepared for the gravity presented in Toy Story 3. While on a story track similar to that of Toy Story 2 -- toys faced with their version of mortality try to take actions against that inevitability -- the third movie feels much more urgent because they no longer have the few more years of their owner Andy's childhood to cushion them. Now, the end has come -- Andy is about to go to college, and the gang we've come to know and love have had their numbers thinned, and the remaining core of the group had been stuffed in a toybox for presumably years. Now Andy's mother has asked him to do one of three things with them -- store them in the attic, donate them to the local daycare center, or throw them away.

Except for Woody, the toys have real reason to believe that they're being tossed to the curb, so they manage to stow away in the donations box to be taken to the daycare. At this point, you really feel the fright -- that the end is impending, and now they will do anything to curtail it. Woody claims that Andy planned to stow them in the attic as they had initially expected, but they no longer believe it, so panicked are they. Here it may not be presumptuous of me to say this has echoes of Ingmar Bergman, and how starkly he depicted the effects of anticipating the finality of death.

The daycare center turns out to be some kind of purgatory -- toys go there and, as the leader of the daycare toys, cuddly teddy bear Lotso (voice of Ned Beatty), claims, they will always be played with, since new kids always replace the ones who grow older. This proves to be a double-edged sword, since initially the kids that play with the newly arrived toys are toddlers who mash and mangle their playthings. Purgatory gives way to a glimpse of hell, when it turns out the ruling toys there have instigated what amounts to a prison system. So naturally, our heroic gang must find a way to break out, giving us the makings of a prison-escape movie, which leads to a climax that builds up to what I would call the thematic key of the movie. Without trying to spoil anything, I will say the gang does indeed face hell, and understands what their final fate must be. The film's ending could appropirately be described as divine -- from what delivers them directly from danger to their next phase, which amounts to a rebirth. And at the end, you may shed tears, unashamedly.

Myself, I felt the weight of life. Toy Story 3 addresses the final phase of the path of life through the allegory of the lives of toys, of all things. It's such a deep wrap-up that it makes the previous two movies feel like episodes, while this movie feels like the summation. It lifts the perspective from the local one of Andy's toys to the much bigger picture that all toys -- all beings -- walk similar paths and must one day face their fates. It is indeed the darkest of the three movies, and it makes me very happy to know the team at Pixar didn't back down from the corner they knew they were writing themselves into. What started out as a cute idea -- toys have secret lives of their own in which their purpose is to bring happiness to the kids who play with them -- became extrapolated to its natural endpoint, i.e., the toys' usefulness ends when the kids outgrow them. There really isn't a happily ever after for them, but, like all of us, they put off the thoughts of the far future and invest in the present. And then one day, that far future is here, and where do they go? How do they react?

It's worth noting that the message re-emphasized is the one of friendship, of sticking together. This time, though, the relativity of that good weighed against what's out there past infinity and beyond is huge. It really gets across the idea that the little doses of love are our best and only arms against the idea of impermanence.

Please don't get me wrong -- as I've said, Toy Story 3 is masterfully constructed to be a crowdpleasing riot of a movie, one that doesn't require deeper inspection in order to receive a full dose of satisfaction and smiles from it. It doesn't do anything too unpredictable in terms of plot and plot devices -- in fact, one might cite this as its main weakness, that these elements are actually too predictable. But the folks at Pixar know exactly what they're doing, because those deeper themes are there, and they greatly outweigh the weaknesses of any mechanical elements. Look past the comedy, and the gravity and the truths are there. Boy, are they there.

(Released by Walt Disney Motion Pictures and rated "G" for general audiences.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.

(SPOILER: Read only if you've already seen this movie.) I just want to talk about a personal way I interpreted the end of Toy Story 3. For all intents and purposes, by the time the toys reach the furnace and hold hands to accept what's coming, they've essentially died. What happens next? A literal deus ex machina rescues them -- "the claw" -- and when you think about the origins of the term deus ex machina, it makes perfect sense (not to mention the Pizza Planet alien toys have always referred to the claw as some kind of deity). By this point, the toys have completed their Divine Comedy-like journey, having visited Inferno and Purgatory, and now receiving a Paradise-like afterlife, where they start anew with a new owner. Or, perhaps more appropriately, this is a reincarnation. And at first glance, it's a happy ending. But all you have to do is think a little further and understand that this cycle will repeat again, not just for this group of toys, but for all the toys out there -- and for all of us. And what we see from them is that one day they will get to the end, but they'll squeeze every minute getting there. A delicately happy tragedy, the Toy Story series has matured into a masterpiece.