Disney / Pixar 
 
 Sheriff Woody is doing his durnedest to save the world from Hamm the piggy bank, alias Dr. Evil Porkchop  "That's Mister Dr. Evil Porkchop to you!"  before the Old West train Woody's on and the orphans inside crash to their doom. His cowgal pal Jessie rides to the rescue, and space ranger Buzz Lightyear is, as always, eager to take his friends "to infinity  and beyond!" But even they may be no match for the spaceship that descends and, when its doors open, reveals ... 
 
 ... Reveals, in the first scene of Toy Story 3, that the boy Andy has a terrific time playing with his toys. In a bedroom strewn with all kinds of characters, from cowboys and astromen to a Slinky dog and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, the 7-year-old mashes genres together to accommodate them all. Toys trigger what the movie's director, Lee Unkrich, calls a child's "crazy, non sequitur imagination." They unlock his creativity, let him play out elaborate scenarios inspired by films and TV shows he's seen and then remade in the wild innocence of a young mind  one that knows all the rules of narrative but doesn't mind smashing them with Dadaist abandon. (See a photographic history of Pixar.) 
 
 That's the creative strategy at Pixar, which produced the first computer-animated feature, Toy Story, in 1995 and has bloomed ever since, through Finding Nemo, WALLE and last year's Up. Pixar filmmakers have to be able to tap into their vestigial child, their inner Andy. In that sense, the Toy Story series is their collective autobiography. Like Andy, the Pixarians  from creative director John Lasseter on down  are smart kids who never renounced their childish belief that anything is possible. Why, to make an instant classic like Toy Story 3, it just takes an unfettered imagination, several hundred artists and technicians, about $200 million and four years of nonstop work. Child's play. 
 
 In 15 years, the Pixar unit has produced just 11 features. The first 10  Toy Story; A Bug's Life; Toy Story 2; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; Ratatouille; WALLE and Up  are not just some of the best computer-animated films but some of the liveliest, brightest, most heartfelt movies of the recent past. That they have earned lots of money ($5.6 billion worldwide) for Pixar and its parent company, Disney, is almost beside the point. Like the earliest Walt Disney fables, Pixar films are for children and their parents and everyone who can be touched by moving images. "We don't make movies for kids," Unkrich says emphatically. "Our mission statement is to make films for everybody." That includes the Motion Picture Academy: Pixar has won five of the nine Oscars for Best Animated Feature and the last three in a row. (See the top 10 voices behind Pixar characters.) 
 
 Okay, but a third Toy Story, from a studio where nine of the first 10 features were total originals? Lasseter, who directed and co-wrote the first two Toy Story films and who's supervising second episodes of Cars and Monsters, Inc., allows that some people "make sequels as a way of printing money, and they tend to rehash the same idea." He insists Pixar returns to favorite characters because "they are alive in us. We think of them as friends and family. We want to see what new, deeper emotions we can find." 
 
 For Toy Story 3's screenwriter Michael Arndt (who won an Oscar for writing Little Miss Sunshine), that meant rethinking each old toy and finding unsuspected human wrinkles. The film's visual style, bracingly clear in its 3-D version, is both state-of-the-CGI-art and faithful to the simple design of the first two films. "I wanted it to look great," says Unkrich, who served as editor on the first Toy Story and co-director on the second. "But it also had to look like Toy Story." What's more potent is the upping of the emotional ante. TS3 puts its characters and the moviegoing children who love them in their severest crisis yet. Not since the early Disney classics have cartoon characters faced so dire a threat with such heroic grace. Lasseter recalls a meeting of the Pixar brain trust for the first reading of the story. "By the end," he says, "I had tears streaming down my face. I looked around the table, and we all had tears." 
 
 Watch TIME's video "How to Be a Cartoon Voice." ||||| The years off have not been kind to the Men in Black—Josh Brolin as the young, 1969 version of Agent K is the only saving grace in this uneven, long-in-the-making sequel to the sequel 
 
 Columbia Pictures 
 
 It’s silly to feel sorry for a big studio movie, especially a second sequel bound to make buckets of money, but director Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black 3, arriving 15 years after his original and 10 after Men in Black 2, is so creaky and out of touch it inspires pity. Its opening sequences are a near marvel of confusion, mayhem and embarrassments for its actors. If it was a person, you’d worry it had dementia. 
 
 Agents K (Tommy Lee Jones) and J (Will Smith) are back, but the reliable tart and taciturn vs. sweet and sassy energy between them is absent, as if they filmed their scenes independently, acting opposite puppets in front of a blue screen. Their banter is blather. At a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan they manage to fight off a slew of aliens. In 3-D Rick Baker’s creations, while never intended to be taken seriously, seem goofy, old-fashioned and repellent in the wrong way—that is, you really don’t want to look at them. Even blasting aliens in tandem, K and J still aren’t connecting. J is needier than usual, while K is brooding; an alien he locked up 40 years ago, Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement from The Flight of the Conchords), has escaped from a lunar prison and is headed back in time, to July 1969, just before the first moon walk, to kill K. 
 
 (MORE: TIME’s interview with Oscar-winning makeup artist and creature maker Rick Baker’s inspirations) 
 
 The average moviegoer is well educated in the particulars of time travel. Even if your high school curriculum didn’t include any H.G. Wells, thanks to Back to the Future, Terminator and dozens of other films, just about everyone knows how it works. Why don’t the fleet of screenwriters who cooked up this script? They have J wake up the morning after the bloodbath at the Chinese restaurant to a world already missing K. This makes no sense. Boris has gone back in time, but given that he hasn’t found or killed young K yet, old K ought to be alive, well and doing that “sort of surly Elvis” thing he does in contemporary Manhattan. Instead he’s dead and gone, and at headquarters, only the boss and former paramour, O (Emma Thompson, 53 and playing 65 or so, every actress’s dream) even remembers old K. 
 
 Also, an alien invasion has commenced, because while K was capturing Boris back in 1969 he also put up a shield that prevented anyone from Boris’ planet to enter the atmosphere. (One more logistical lament: that would include Boris in 2009.) J goes back in time to save young K and stop the invasion. Just before he leaps, J gets a warning from the guy (Michael Chernus) who lends him the time traveling device, which looks like a cross between a police badge and a smart phone, to be careful in 1969. “It wasn’t the best time for your people,” he cautions. J looks baffled, as if being a black man today didn’t include having some sense of what being a black man in 1969 was like. Maybe he’s been hitting the neuralyzer in his down time. 
 
 (SPECIAL: What year Will Smith landed on the Time 100 list) 
 
 Without Jones, it must be said, Men in Black 3 improves considerably. The actual time traveling sequence, which starts with Smith in freefall from the Chrysler Building, is the kind of special effect that makes the annoyance of the 3-D glasses worth it for a few minutes. 1969 is reasonably fun—and if anyone can pull off jokes about racial profiling, it is the ever-likeable Will Smith. There’s an entertaining run-in with Andy Warhol (Bill Hader) and the whole Factory gang and a few sweet scenes with a Mork-like alien (Michael Stuhlbarg, who starred in the Coen’s A Serious Man). 
 
 But the best reason for going back in time, and really, when it comes down to it, the only reason to see Men in Black 3, is Josh Brolin, who plays young K. His Tommy Lee Jones voice is not that far removed from the George Bush voice he used in W., but he hits all those querulous notes just right. Posture, body language, Brolin nails it; his sideways glance is pure poetry of Tommy Lee-ness. Even if you love Jones, and many of us do, it can be hard to distinguish between his characters—so often maximum misanthropes—and his suffer-no-fools public persona. In his brief scenes in Men in Black 3, which mercifully only constitute 10 or so minutes of screen time, Jones gives the impression that he’s genuinely miserable being there. Meanwhile, Brolin looks like he’s having the time of his life playing a youthful curmudgeon, and he reminds us what was so delightful about Jones and his taciturn routine in the first place. J keeps looking at young, cool K and shaking his head. “What happened to you?” he wants to know. For Jones, likely a case of sustained sequelitis. 
 
 MORE: Time’s Richard Corliss on W
– If the goal of movies is to provide viewers with an escape from their everyday lives, then these movies offer that, with an extra hallucinogenic slap in the face. Salon set out to find the 10 Trippiest Movies Ever Made, and Matt Zoller Seitz's collection has everything from Disney to David Lynch to Porky Pig. Samples: Porky in Wackyland (1938): Here's one part: "In a field of towering mushrooms, Porky is menaced by a huge, fanged beast who suddenly starts traipsing about like a toddler, pealing, 'La la la! La la la!," writes Seitz. The Loony Tunes short is a true “mind-effer.” Fantasia (1940): Come on, dancing mushrooms? The psychedelic combo of instrumental music and choreographed animation—both dramatically horrifying and playfully silly—was probably pretty wicked for kids at the time. Yellow Submarine (1968): Another popular animation set to music, this movie follows the Fab Four on a journey to restore color to Pepperland…and that’s essentially all the plot you’ll find. The rest is stunning visual imagery to accompany Beatles’ classics like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Inland Empire (2006): This list wouldn’t truly be trippy without infamous surreal director David Lynch. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic, "a parable of evolution and the limits of imagination," plays with the mind’s concept of space, time, and human existence. After 43 years, it still lives up to its original promo, “The ultimate trip.” See the other trippy classics that made the list.