Toy Story 3

Kayci's birthday party on Friday was a Toy Story movie party. We had a party at the theater and saw Toy Story 3 on its first day of release. Kayci has been pumpedmfor almost a year, ever since she found outnthat Toy Story 3 was coming out on her birthday. I, on the other hand was excited just by the fact that there would be a Toy Story 3.

Toy Story was a groundbreaking film, and I remember going to see it in the theater with my college roommate, Johnny. It was mind-blowing, not only because it was the first full-length animated feature, but because the story and the animation are just so good. 

Toy Story 2 also has a lot of great memories surrounding it for me.  When it came out in 1999, it was a fun period in my life.  We were relative newlyweds still learning how to be adults and learning about life and each other. Kristi wanted Woody and Jessie dolls, so I had a lot of fun finding them and ordering them on ebay for Christmas.

Toy Story 2 had some genuinely sad moments,  such as Jessie's flashback to her old owner.  It still moves me. But it has nothing on the emotion in Toy Story 3. 

Toy Story 3 is a much darker film than the others, dealing with much heavier themes. Toy Story was a buddy picture and dealt with themes such as trust and redemption.  Toy Story 2 was about loyalty and deciding for yourself what your path will be. But Toy Story 3 deals mostly with age and facing one's own mortality.

Andy is preparing to go to college and must decide what he wants to do with his favorite childhood toys, which have been shut up in a toy chest for years. And one striking thing is that only the majors are left. Bo Peep, Etch, RC and other familiar secondary characters from the previous films are all gone - given away or sold in yard sales over the years. Woody calls a staff meeting, similar to the way he does in the first film, and wonders where all the toys are.  One of the other toys explains "we're all that are left."

I guess that what's hard about the third installment is that the toys all know that they're done and past their prime. There is a very keen awareness that they're about to go into mothballs for years and years with the hopefulness that they can maybe be one day useful again when Andy or Molly has kids.

We've all been through this with our toys, only - just as in the first Toy Story - we've never really thought of the ramifications from their perspective. That's what makes Toy Story 3 hard to watch. We've all thrown away beloved toys or watched them sold in garage sales or buried them in the backyard, never to be unearthed again. It can be tough enough to let those things go, especially when years later - with the distance and maturity of age - we wish we had them back. But to see our toys actually yearning, longing to be played with, even just held again, is tough.

The end of the film is enough to make you cry. I won't give away the ending, other than to say that it accurately captures an emotion that we all must go through at some point at our lives if we are introspective enough to let ourselves recognize what it is. We all must grow up and move on.

This film, 15 years after the original, is interesting in that it has aged and grown and speaks to different audiences in very different ways. I imagine a fifteen-year-old who saw the original Toy Story in 1995. That person is thirty now and is starting to wrestle with the passing of their youth and their journey into maturity. For me, at age 35 (and forty looming closer than I'd like) it illustrates very clearly issues I've been wrestling with in my own life with the gradual realization that I may be past my prime physically, but fighting it every step of the way and not wanting to give in to the realization that I am getting older. and for an older generation who may be watching this movie with their grandkids, I imagine that the theme for them is the gradual loss of friends and family and the realization that the end is nearing, yet struggling with the nagging feeling that they still have life and usefulness in them yet, if only they could tap into it.

Death and obsolescence is certainly a big part of this film. But it's treated in a very subtle way that, thankfully, little kids probably won't pick up on. But it's there in spades. [spoiler alert] And even though our heroes survive to the end of the film, we're forced to deal with their destruction. And in that moment, a very important life lesson is taught. At the end, when everything else is done, what matters most is your friends and family and the ones you love. Those people around you will give you strength and peace and comfort.

Toy Story 3 is a great film, but I have to be honest: I'm not in an incredible hurry to go back to the theater to see it anytime soon.