Once again, Pixar has proven itself to be the master of animated pathos. Staggering out of the theatre today after undergoing the sound emotional drubbing that is Toy Story 3, I was surprised anew at how deeply I can be made to care for, to emotionally connect with, an animated character (and a plastic-faced cowboy toy, at that). It's a wonderful movie: a deeply satisfying conclusion to the story of Woody, Buzz and Andy. It's clever and funny and engrossing throughout and you should see it. Just don't plan on doing anything mentally or emotionally strenuous immediately afterward...we came home and had ice-cream.
This is hardly the first time Pixar has managed to unexpectedly play on my heart-strings. WALL-E (2008) was, for me, the first entirely computer generated character who I found that I really cared about by the end of the movie, which is remarkable since he was a robot. Up (2009) achieved something similar just in laying out the back story for the main plot, telling an incredibly moving and tragic story of friendship, love, dreams, disappointments, death and loneliness that could make your eyes glisten, all in the first 20 minutes of the movie. But Toy Story 3 had more to work with than either of these movies. These are characters we know; characters we first met in 1995 in the original Toy Story (yep, it really has been 15 years); we need to know it turns out OK for them in the end.
More so than the previous installments in the series, Toy Story 3 touches on deep and serious themes. Toy Story 2 brought up issues of trust, friendship, loyalty, and abandonment. The new movie engages with all those issues (if anything more so than the last one) but also tells a 'coming of age' story and looks at the inevitability of change and loss as well as, in its own way, the problems of immortality. It manages, at different times, to be laugh-out-loud funny, immensely tragic, truly scary, and thoughtfully contemplative. All of this is still wrapped in a kid's story about childrens' toys, but there's no missing the deeper themes if you're an adult. The plot is especially poignant for those (myself included) who were children when the first movie came out and have, like Andy, grown up since then. Toy Story 3 captures the bitter-sweetness inherent in letting go of the past, in moving on to different phases of life, by showing how one boy's past tries to let go of him and to move on, itself, to new things. It's really quite brilliant in its way.
As we left the theatre and drove home, we talked about whether or not it was a movie we'd recommend for kids. There's a lot of stuff that's quite scary, both in the creepy sense and the fear-of-betrayal-or-abandonment sense. There are numerous close calls and last-minute saves in life threatening situations. And of course that's all on top of the other emotionally draining issues the film wrestles with. In the end, though, we just weren't sure how much of it young kids would actually pick up on. There were plenty of them in the theatre with us and they all seemed to be fine at the end: it was only the adults who left with tear-streaked faces. In the end, I guess it all comes down to the temperament of the individual kid, though I think I'd avoid taking very small children simply because of the intensity of some of the scary scenes. In my opinion, while many kids will doubtless enjoy it, Toy Story 3, like several of Pixar's more recent films, is really meant for adults, and especially for people who went to see the original Toy Story in the theatre 15 years ago. It's a terrific movie, and if I were going to introduce a rating system in this blog (which I'm not), I would no doubt rate it highly.
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