Pixar and Me: A Toy Story Retrospective

Warning: this post contains spoilers for all three Toy Story films and some extremely emotional italics.

The first Toy Story film came out in the UK in 1996. I was 6 years old. Like a lot of six year old girls, I had more than a passing fondness for pink, princesses, Cinderella, ballerinas, that kind of thing.  I had a princess party for my sixth birthday, much to the joy of my male playmates.  When I tell people this now, it usually surprises them; as regular discerning readers may glean, I'm not so much one for romantic comedy, more one for spurious escapism powered by explosions.  So what happened?  The short answer is Toy Story.  Toy Story happened.

When my parents took me to see Toy Story, the excitement on their part was largely to do with this new form of animation, which was – gasp – done on a computer.  Maybe some of this excitement rubbed off on me because, so far as I remember, I was rather keen to see this funny-looking film, despite obvious lack of castles, dresses, oppressive patriarchy etc.  By the time the credits rolled, I don’t think I or either of my parents were even considering the artistic and technological advances in animation because oh my god Toy Story was the best thing we had ever seen.  To this day, the trilogy tops every list of favourite films I make: nostalgia value, artistic merit, tight writing, aesthetics, storytelling, voice acting, it's got it all.  You can keep Citizen Kane.  I've got Toy Story.

But my relationship with Toy Story goes beyond artistic appreciation. It had a huge influence over my development as a person: from the moment Woody and pals did their jerky early-CGI swagger into my life, princesses were discarded.  I was going to be a cowboy.  I then quickly amended this ambition to cowgirl.  Toy Story woke in me some dormant tomboy gene, a desire for adventure and thrills: it was the start of a whole new way of being that was very different to the narratives that Cinderella was feeding me.  There's nothing wrong with being a girly-girl, of course, but there aren't nearly as many good stories involved.  If all your fairytales end with a handsome prince, you're getting a very limited worldview to say the least.  Toy Story led to me devouring Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Pippi Longstocking, Roald Dahl and, not much later, Harry Potter in a way I wouldn’t have done before.  Fairytales were swapped for Greek myths: so much bolder and brighter, with gods and monsters and heroes and people doing things.  Suddenly, there were more colours in the world than pink.

You know the montage in the first film where all of Andy's cowboy stuff turns into Buzz Lightyear stuff?  That happened to me.  Discarded was my faithful Snow White costume and in came a swanky new Woody outfit, complete with sheriff badge and hat.  The plastic orgy of Barbies in various states of hard, shiny undress were converted from dress-up toys into complex societies of doctors, superheroes, witches, singers and actors with more back-stabbing, secret alliances and political manoeuvring than a Game of Thrones episode (though probably about as much nudity, I had been gifted a lot of second-hand Barbies but not many clothes to cover their dubious modesty).  The cherry on the cake of all this was my own Woody doll - much chunkier than the film's lanky rag doll, but I wrote my name on his boot nonetheless - and a shiny silver special edition Buzz.  I'll never forget the horror of a friend's younger sibling asking to borrow Woody and the reproving look on my mother's face as I turned my beseeching eyes towards her.  Woody came back minus his hat and with his pull string broken.  They bought me a new one that played guitar but it wasn't the same.  Woody as I knew and loved him was gone and it probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't done what my mother told me.  Goddamit, mum.  It was a dark chapter in my history and if you think I'm joking, only a little.*  I suppose the long and the short of it is that Toy Story taught me how to play. 

I turned 22 on Sunday.  For my birthday present to myself, I sat down with a close friend and a lot of pizza and watched Toy Story 3.  Before I address the film itself, I'll just say this: even at this age, it is my 7-year-old self that enjoys car chases, heists, prison breaks, explosions and shoot outs.  When I reviewed The Avengers, what I could not show you was my facial expression, which was one of pure childlike glee.  Toy Story's influence lives on also in my sense of humour: silliness, snarkiness and surrealism living comfortably side by side.  Buzz proclaiming, "Don't you get it?! I am MRS NESBITT" will never, ever not be funny to me.  We love talking about how Pixar invented the kids-films-secretly-for-adults genre, although as I get older I'm not even sure they're for kids at all.  I was severely disappointed in Finding Nemo when I first saw it at the age of 13, but as (more of) an adult the scene where Nemo turns around and tells his Dad, "I hate you" is extremely powerful.  Witness also the separation and reunion aspects of Monsters Inc, the bleak yet hopeful view of humanity envisioned in Wall-E, the obligatory mention of the first ten minutes of Up: I don't think Pixar is making kid's films at all, not even secretly-for-parents-kid's-films.  I think Pixar is making films to please itself and by god, I salute them.  Except for Cars.  Cars was a bit shit.

No matter what else it produces, though, the Toy Story Trilogy in its entirety is always going to be the pinnacle of achievement for Pixar.  For me personally, it holds a cachet shared only by one other series - Harry Potter (the books, obviously) - of having grown up as I have grown up.  Both series place strong emphases on friendship, courage and resourcefulness, both are funny and wildly imaginative.  I spent a lot of my teenage years emulating the dress and mannerisms of various fictional characters (Winona Ryder in Beatlejuice, take a bow) in the fruitless quest for self-identity that is adolescence but there's probably only one fictional character I've ever really wanted to be, and though I've put away my lassoo-skipping-rope now, I still hold that if I can be something like Woody - wisecracking, courageous, loyal, a leader, flawed but ultimately good – I could do alright.  In fact, much of the first film is driven by Woody's flaws; on my recent re-watch I was kind of surprised to discover how much of a jerk he is, so I guess Toy Story is also responsible for starting my worrying tendency to become a furious apologist for anti-social fictional men.  And on the topic of changing perspectives, when I was a kid it was Woody's fears of rejection and replacement that I related to - playground politics can be so cruel - but as an adult, Jesus Christ, is there anything sadder than watching Buzz's heroic breakdown when he realises he's not a real space ranger?  With the sad song and the window and the no! I will fly! moment?  And because Hollywood teaches us that if you really really want something and are an attractive twentysomething or an adorable cartoon character you can definitely always get it, we believe he's going to fly and then he doesn't?  And he loses his arm for trying? Blimey, Pixar, you ever think about pulling your punches a little?

And, of course, the films only get progressively darker and more spiritually wounding as they go on.  Most conceptual universes don't tend to examine the ins and out of the realities they create, but Toy Story 2 took the difficult questions of toy ownership - and sentient toys - and ran with it.  What happens when the kids start to grow up?  There's only really a few exits for toys from the playroom: donation, the attic or, most likely, in a bin bag.  The bottom line is that kids grow up and move on.  Toy Story 2 was one for the parents in this respect: the feelings of abandonment and rejection that Woody and Jessie experience are a poignant analogue for the knowledge that every parent faces - one day they too will appear "used" and "outgrown" to their children.  But the final message is redemptive: we cannot stop ourselves or our children from growing up but we can enjoy it while it lasts.  And if we are loved, truly loved with the special bond that Andy and Emily shared with their toys, that love can sustain us when the relationship is no longer as immediate or dependent as it once was.  And it's probably no accident that the weepy Sarah McLachlan ballad that plays over the heartbreaking montage of Jessie's abandonment by her owner also borrows heavily from the semantics of a romantic relationship ending.  Far from the usual Disney fare, in which walking off into the sunset is par for the course, the second lesson Pixar taught me with the Toy Story trilogy was that relationships ending is a fact of life, but it doesn't have to be the end of the world.  The final note is bittersweet, a relative first for children's entertainment, with Woody proclaiming that Andy's childhood "won't last forever" but "I wouldn't miss a moment of it".  Of course, then Toy Story 3 took those themes and turned them into a harrowing emotional black hole from which I barely managed to escape with my battered soul intact.

I never doubted that Toy Story 3 was going to be good.  It was simply far too important to fail, not just to me but to the thousands of kids in my age bracket who were now packing up their bedrooms to head off into the unknown.  Like that other fictional boy I grew up alongside, Harry Potter, Andy was now my age, or thereabouts, and now here was Pixar, showing us that we had not been forgotten, that they were here to close the final chapter on our childhoods.  I'm pretty certain I wasn't alone in practically pushing small children out of the way to get to the front of queue because goddammit eight-year-olds, you have no idea what this means.  I also spent a fair few minutes in conversation with the girl at the desk trying to sell me Odeon membership.  After some rapid and confusing exchanges about how much money I would be saving, I wailed in a loud and plaintive tone that sent heads turning across the foyer, "I JUST WANT TO SEE TOY STORY 3."  So to say I cried might be an understatement - from the opening sequence, taken word for word from the first two films, to the last half hour solid, I was pretty much a mess.

When I re-watched it yesterday, sufficient time had passed that I could also appreciate how breathtakingly well made it is.  The animation had progressed astoundingly compared to the original 1995 film; Pixar has always been shy about animating humans unless cartoonishly stylised first (Ratatouille, The Incredibles) but they seem to have conquered Uncanny Valley (explained in this post) with a vengeance because holy crap, look at all those emotions!  Look at grown-up Andy playing with Bonnie!  Look at Andy's mum tearing up in his empty bedroom!  Look at all these people.  The textures and tones were richer, the lighting beautifully rendered: eerie and flickering strip bulbs, sunlight through leaves, rainstorms, every single piece of debris in the furnace glowing and casting individual shadows.  It's a beautifully designed film.  It's also gleefully funny.  Just when one is ready to condemn the Americans for lack of wit, they go and pull something like Spanish Buzz which was, without a doubt, one of the best things on celluloid this side of the millennium, and probably the other as well.  The level of nuance in it is far greater than I'd appreciated: I'd thought the real emotional heft was contained to the last half hour but my friend and I were brushing away stray tears from the first act as the toys make one last ditch attempt to reconnect with Andy and fail resoundingly.  Even the only thing that I actively disliked about the film - the absence of Bo Peep - wasn't something I could fault artistically since it established that the years really hadn't been kind to our gang (but seriously guys, did you have to make the look on Woody's face when he said Bo was gone so painful?  and did you have to not even say what happened to her so maybe she wasn't even given away, maybe she got broken or something?  Stop fucking with my essential sense of narrative justice).  The film juggles genres with a nonchalance that Joss Whedon (a writer on the first film, by the way) has wet dreams about.  First it's an adventure flick, then that's a dream sequence, that it's all farewells and gritty emotional drama, then it turns into an eerie dystopia, then it's a prison break film with Mission Impossible overtones, then we reach the last half hour and holy fuck every known reference point for film goes out the window because I'm crying like a housewife with a bottle of gin and a DVD of Beaches.

I am willing to admit that, like every other person in that cinema, I truly believed they were going into that furnace.  Even if you said afterwards you knew all along they were going to be fine, you're lying because a tiny part of you deep down was preparing to say goodbye to these characters forever.  Which is then exactly what we had to do ten minutes later.  God fucking dammit, Pixar, how dare you have such puppet-master-like control over my heartstrings?  How dare you?  And do you know why it worked?  Because having the toys melt into bubbling plastic globs would have been easier.  It would have been the cheap emotionally manipulative ending that we're so used to seeing Hollywood pull.  No, forcing us to confront the terrible, bleak, mentally-scarring reality - that we'd always have memories of childhood but we weren't allowed to be children anymore, that it was someone else's turn to be a child - that is so much crueller.  Damn you, Lasseter.  Damn you, Pixar.  Damn you all to the special hell.

So maybe what sets Toy Story 3 apart as a film, that cements the trilogy's place in my heart, is that it's neither for children nor for adults: it's for us, those in-betweeny, hard to place 'young adults' who grew up with the original films.  That doesn't mean no-one else can enjoy it - my mum walked in on the last ten minutes and started crying immediately - but it is for us.  For which one can only say, along with Andy, thanks guys.  You're all really special but I have to go away now.  And if we're really lucky, we get to see someone else enjoying the thing that we once enjoyed, and if we're really really lucky then we get to see them loving it, and that love doesn't fade or lessen even if time is against us in all other respects.

Blimey.  Batman Batman Batman.  That's better.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to stockpile some tissues and go watch Wall-E.


*EDIT: Since posting this, my mother has informed me that I wasn't actually there when the request came for temporary possession of my Woody doll, so I can only assume that what I'm remembering is outrage as only a seven-year-old can be outraged, along with a seven-year-old's morality which disregards things like kindness and common courtesy because everyone else should just stay away from my toys.  I'd also like to point out that I've neglected to mention that Toy Story was a hugely important series not just to me but my whole family - say "Mrs Nesbitt" to any member of my family and they'll laugh.  Or cry.  Damn, I think I'm starting again.

Cheekbones in Space: Prometheus Review (Spoiler-free)

I don't really get people who automatically discount science fiction.  Yeah, I wasn't always a fan.  But even in my tenderest youth, I have never scanned a film poster for the slightest hint of tentacle or laser or teleportation and gone, "How dare you?!  You, sir, are trying to make me watch a - gasp - science fiction film."  Even when it didn't interest me as a genre, I never treated the entire collective as though if I touched it, the Facehugger of Deadly Nerddom would jump out and facerape me into a John Hurt-style coma where eventually an ugly geek child version of myself would burst its way out of the chest cavity of what used to be a nice, normal girl before she got mixed up in all that - gasp - science fiction.  I mention this because a) I have actually encountered this attitude in people in real life and b) Ridley Scott has created a film that is extraordinarily beautiful, both visually and otherwise, and you should go and see it, like, right now.

The most common criticism of sci-fi seems to be that it's too unrealistic to relate to and, indeed, there are two ways you can go with this.  You can acknowledge you're in a science fiction movie and just have fun with whooshing doors and phasers and unintentional dystopias where everyone dresses the same and nobody comments on this sinister conformity.  Or you can look at the potential within science fiction to transcend that genre, and build something that no other genre gives you the sheer freedom to imagine.  Come to think of it, that's why people who 'can't relate' to sci-fi confuse me.  Empathy.  Imagination.  Your special gifts as a member of the human race.  Use them.

Because ultimately science fiction is all about environment.  It's saying, "Yeah, this is set in a world like ours but not ours, and the go-to explanation for weird shit is science.  (If the explanation is 'a wizard did it', you're looking at fantasy.*)" It's world-building.  And what Scott does best, of course, is world-building.  Blade Runner isn't really a significant cinematic achievement for its plot or characters (Harrison Ford eats Chinese food a lot, looks cool, bangs robots) so much as its vision of our dystopian, corporate-run yet grimly beautiful future.  The world-building in Prometheus is off the charts.  We are taken from one stunning environment to the next, from bleak, haunting vistas on the Isle of Skye (Scottish Tourist Board, Ridley will accept with cash or cheque) to the clean, threatening lines of the Prometheus ship itself - the design of which is reflected in everything from the dark blue minimalist space suits to the silver-plated champagne bottles to Michael Fassbender's new Aryan hairdo - to the depths of an otherworldly colony, the twisting black gooey textures of which will recall some familiar creatures to those who have seen the previous Alien films and seriously unsettle those who haven't.  It is a miracle of design from beginning to end, though for me the standout moment (without giving anything away) concerns Fassbender's lonely robot David standing inside a holographic projection of all the terrifying, awe-inspiring majesty of space.  It's a beautiful moment of seamless design, effects and acting combining to make me go a little bit wibbly.

And speaking of awe-inspiring majesty, all the awe and majesty and awesome and majestic bobbins on show here are no accident.  Voltaire said (and if your inner Adolescent Philosophy Student Alert Alarm is going off right now, I don't blame you) that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.  Neil Gaiman wrote an entire novel based on the concept that faith is a creative energy, constructing gods out of things that we put our belief in.  Prometheus runs along the same lines, juggling hefty questions about our origins and what it means for God and faith if we start finding answers: discount religion entirely or keeping believing nonetheless?  The questions it raises are thoughtful but also lead to one of the few minor criticisms I had of this film, that all this faith-religion-science stuff is just a bit too nebulous to amount to anything tangible.

Fortunately, the cast is universally strong so you can just focus on the human drama if you like.  Noomi Rapace is excellent as Dr Elizabeth Shaw, all bright-eyed curiosity and calm capability and, crucially, possesses at least a modicum of common sense that makes her intensely rootable-for.  Logan Marshall-Green as Boyfriend Doctor Charlie Holloway is less likeable as the film's purveyor of Dickish Hubris but puts in a good performance.  Idris Elba is the film's Cool Black Dude (there's one in every Alien film, go check) but he is the Coolest of the Cool Black Dudes.  The more I think about Charlize Theron, the most I liked not only her performance but her character Meredith Vickers, the icy bitch-queen of Weyland Corporation.  Guy Pearce is slightly odd casting as the ancient Peter Weyland, founder of said corporation, and one of the rare decisions that doesn't hold up (what have you got against actors who actually, like, old, Ridley?  Enquiring minds want to know).  The standout performance is Michael Fassbender as aforementioned lonely robot David, who just wants to be a real boy.  Sort of.  I'm not sure if Fassbender's characters always start out as the most interesting ones or whether he just makes them that way by dint of sheer acting.  Seriously, that guy must be exhausted from all the bloody acting he does.  Actually seriously though, it's a fascinatingly detailed performance and I'm unsurprised that my cursory google turned up an interview where he stated avoiding watching the androids of previous Alien films and taking the Blade Runner replicants as his reference point, because that's exactly where my brain went.  He combines the Rutger Hauer arrogance with the Daryl Hannah childlike naivety and is thoroughly compelling throughout ("thoroughly compelling" - that's a thing that people say in reviews, right?).  It also doesn't give anything away to say that of the two blockbusters I have reviewed this summer, both contribute to the trend in sympathetic be-cheekboned villains with really shit sort-of dads.

Prometheus  has received mixed reviews from the press, largely because "it's not like Alien".  I can't help but think much of these are missing the point.  No, it's not Alien.  It's a totally different genre to Alien.  I'm not sure what genre it is, except maybe pseudo-philosophical-aren't-we-profound-here-are-some-pretty-things-to-look-at-so-you-might-not-notice-we-don't-know-what-the-fuck's-going-on (also included: Danny Boyle's Sunshine).  If I sound like I'm making mock, well, only a little.  Prometheus aims for something huge and succeeds on many many levels, enough to make a stunningly well-made film and, for a film where a lot of violent shit goes down, a strangely uplifting paean to human endeavour and courage.

Gosh, I've gone all serious.  Batman.  There, that's better. Though if I use Batman to drag things back from the brink of attempted profundity, my review for The Dark Knight Rises is going to be a very confused affair.

*Sorry for stealing your joke, Simpsons.  Your penetrating understanding of nerd culture is too much for me.