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.

Jane Shakespeare Watches Buffy: Seasons 1-2

Gather round, kids, it's confession time.  Now, this is very hard for me.  I, Jane Shakespeare, have always proudly called myself a Joss Whedon fan.  Hell, I might even say I'm a fangirl.  (If you don't know the difference, you clearly haven't been on the internet very much.) But in all my nearly twenty-two years on this planet, I have never watched Buffy.

GASP TURN IN YOUR GEEK LICENSE RIGHT NOW, YOUNG LADY.  ALSO YOUR FEMINISM LICENSE WHILE WE'RE AT IT.

But Officer, let me correct myself.  I have never watched Buffy....until now.

Because I, in a fit of what I term 'productivity', have been mainlining episodes of this sweet, televisual goodness like all the illegal streaming sites are going down tomorrow.  Which they may well do if SOPA has its way. (Your slightly outdated satire quota of this blog has now been completed.  Thanks for reading.)

And what I must say is this: YOU GUYS WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME.

All those times when someone went "You've never watched Buffy?" and walked away from the conversation leaving me in no doubt that they thought a little less of me as a person, I kind of assumed that they were being weird because, like, it's a just a TV show and certainly I have always been measured and grounded and suchlike about fictional mediums and not at all prone to sweeping overreactions and abuse of the capslock button.  I'm so sorry, universe, I retract everything.  I now realise I've been letting you down by not engaging with one of the finest on-screen portrayals of attractive teenagers that our times had to offer.

Btdubs, from here on in there be spoilers for Seasons 1-2 and a bit of Season 3.  Spoilers that are fifteen years old and that everyone in the known universe has seen except me but spoilers nonetheless.

So the very first thing I am struck by is how incredibly 90s everyone looks, which makes me happy and sad at the same time because on the one hand the 90s were a truly tragic era for self-expression but on the other, hello childhood.  Seemingly all this 90s chic has wormed its way into my subconscious and thus my wardrobe, because once I start watching I spend the next week looking like Monica from Friends circa Season 3 or, on better days, Linda from Press Gang.

My second reaction is to curse how wrong I was.  Somewhere back in the early 2000s I got the impression that Buffy was a show about Sarah Michelle Gellar being hot and giving teenage goths something mainstream to call their very own.  Which it is, but it isn't.  I should have known from Firefly, really, that Whedon doesn't take on a genre unless he can subvert the hell out of it.  His recent forays into super heroics should have taught me that.  It isn't perfect.  There's some really dud episodes, like the one with the Internet Demon Robot, which I guess is Joss Whedon's equivalent of a Stranger Danger After School Special or something.  In fact, most of Season 1 plods along at a nicely goofy pace and the monsters are fun rather than scary.  The praying mantis/femme fatale thing is well done, the one where Xander gets possessed by a hyena demon confirmed all my worst impressions of him, and even the one with the ventriloquist's dummy (usually a fast-track into my nightmares) is just kind of silly.  Also having 'The Master' as your boss fight villain just makes me think that no self-respecting Time Lord would be seen in such passé attire, no matter how evil he was.

The show really grows some balls throughout Series 2 though. I particularly liked how much they upped the seriousness of Angel and Buffy's relationship, playing off that teenage intensity, and then going "OH BUT YOU THOUGHT THERE WOULD BE NO REPERCUSSIONS, EH?" Without making obvious comparisons with certain contemporary teenage dramas concerning romancing the undead, it's a tremendously clever way of using a sappy teen romance to further plot and character development.  In fact, you could say that of the whole show: it has this gleefully self-conscious B-Movie feel about it - for every bit of "Monsters in High School!" cheesiness, there's a snarky one-liner commenting on how cheesy and ridiculous it is.  My favourite so far is in the Series 2 opener from some kid in the hallway: "This is going to be our year for the football team! If we can just practice really hard, do well, and hope the unusually high death rate goes away!"

I love the characters too.  It's sort of impossible to dislike Buffy, even if I have started to tune out during her "my life is so hard" episodes.  I mean, obviously it is, but it's taking screen time away from characters I like more.  Xander starts off sort of awful but has become less awful as it progresses.  The bit of me that painfully identifies with Willow at that age kind of gets it though as he is pretty nice to look at, and would be comic relief were it not for the fact that everyone's lines are at least as funny, all the time.  Willow is adorbs and would definitely have been my favourite had I watched the show at a younger age.  By pop cultural osmosis, the two things I know about Willow are that she's a lesbian and she's a witch and so far neither of those things are greatly in evidence so I guess Joss really goes in for this whole 'character development' thing.  It's almost a shame because I really, really like Oz and have a dim memory of confiding in a schoolfriend that I kind of fancied Seth Green in the Austin Powers movies (well, the good ones anyway) and her asking if I watched Buffy because he was a cute werewolf in that.  So yeah.  I guess.  Cordelia is also sort of great and I am enjoying her horror at finding herself in a relationship with Xander (taking a bullet for womankind there, one feels).  I spent the first series being surprised at how swoony I found Angel and his throaty-voiced angst but then it became apparent that David Boreanaz ages at thrice the rate of a normal human being and I've kind of gone off him now.  Also, is his soul on elastic or something?  Jesus, man, get a grip.

And Giles!  Giles is consistently excellent and hey, he's a British character on American TV who isn't evil or sporting a completely ridiculously accent so that's progress, I guess.  Though speaking of ridiculous British accents, I was sort of aware that Spike had Billy Idol hair and a leather jacket but holy crap, that voice was not at all what I was expecting.  By which I mean, I did not expect to spend the next hour wandering delightedly around my house bellowing, "OI'M SPOIKE, THE COCKERNY VAMPOIRE, SO OI AM, SO OI AM.  MOI GELFREND'S NAME IS DROOOOSILLAH.  OI'M A BAD, ROOD MAN."  Seriously, he sounds like a cross between Michael Caine and Dick van Dyke.  (Try saying any of this to a female who was in her early adolescence at the time of airing and they look at you like you've just kicked a puppy.)  Drusilla is a product of Whedon's apparent fascination with pretty girls doing bad Mockney, I guess (see also River Tam).  We've also been introduced to Faith and considering that Eliza Dushku was seriously grating on me by the time I got to the end of Dollhouse, she's not too bad here.

But mainly I am struck by how much I would have enjoyed this had I watched it as a kid.  Maybe not when it first aired (I would have been seven and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was already scaring the crap out of me and my over-stimulated imagination) but in my early teens.  Thus all my reactions to the show came accompanied by the voice of little thirteen-year-old me, who - bespectacled, dead straight long hair, bookish - would have had no trouble identifying with lovely, insecure Willow, safe in the knowledge that I would never be as cool as Buffy, no matter how many times I almost threw someone in my after school judo class, and would probably end up spending my days watching the Xanders of my life lust after every other girl but me.  Thirteen-year-old me was remarkably accurate in her predictions.

So to finish, I leave you with this touching scene, of a nominal adult failing to live up the expectations of her younger self.

Now Jane (21) and Then Jane (13) are sitting on a cloud somewhere, eating popcorn.  No wait, that makes it sound like they're dead.  On a sofa, watching Buffy.  Yeah, that'll do.

Now Jane: So Xander is pretty much the worst, right?  He just needs to stop.

Then Jane: I like his eyes.

Now Jane: Oh god, no.  Honey.

Then Jane: He's funny.  We like funny guys.

Now Jane: Yeah but there's a difference between funny and just an awful human bei- holy crap, is that Xander in that tiny bathing suit?  I do not recall any of the nerds I know being that ripped.

Then Jane: Is that - why are you drooling?

Now Jane: Don't worry about it sweetie, you won't have your sexual awakening until Pirates of the Caribbean comes out this year.

Then Jane: Anyway, Xander is a better life choice than some bad boy who just broods and is all mysterious and -

Now Jane: Shut up, Angel is onscreen.

Then Jane: You are a very disappointing future version of myself.

Now Jane: Sorry.  If it makes you feel any better, your generation's angsty vampire-human romance is so much better than the next generation's.  You see that there, when Buffy says that being stalked isn't a big turn on for a girl?  Remember that, Young Jane.  There will come a time when that isn't taken for granted.

Then Jane: I've just started identifying myself as a feminist, you know.

Now Jane: And in a couple of years you'll actually know what that means.

Then Jane: Future Me...

Now Jane: Yes?

Then Jane: I know I said that liking bad boys was stupid...

Now Jane: Yes?

Then Jane: ...but Spike makes me feel all funny inside.

Now Jane: Ah.  I was afraid of this.  I think we need to have a frank and open discussion about the facts of life.

Then Jane: I know about sexing, I'm not an idiot.

Now Jane: Jesus, no.  I'm talking about something much more devastating and potentially life-ruining.  I'm talking about cheekbones.

Then Jane: That sounds exciting.

Now Jane: Oh, it is.  At first.  But pretty soon it's all you can think about and then before you know it you're losing whole days on Eddie Redmayne.  You drift off in the middle of a lecture because the tutor says something that sounds like 'Fassbender' and when you wake up, it's dark.  Cheekbones are dangerous.  You shouldn't be messing around with that shit.

Then Jane: Pfft, you're such a square, Future Jane.  I bet I'll be fine.

Now Jane: Oh, honey.  We can but hope.  Anyway, you're kind of right about bad boys not being worth the effort.  While Future You will be drawn to Spike's nigh-on Michelangelan bone structure, you will also harbour a secret soft spot for Oz.

Then Jane: Oz? Oz? Future You, I think there is something you are not telling me.  Are you on the marijuana?

Now Jane: No! Though, FYI, not nearly as big a deal as they tell you in PSHE.  But yes, Future You will be drawn to this guitar-playing teenage werewolf and feel really weird about fancying Seth Green, even if he is all young and cute and quietly deadpan.  And then Future You will reveal this aberration to the world in the form of a blog that combines pop culture with rage and far too much spare time.

Then Jane: What's a blog?

Now Jane: Trust me, you can wait eight years to find that one out.

Then Jane: Hey, Future Me, can I ask you something?  About the future?

Now Jane: No, you don't get married to Orlando Bloom but you'll also be pretty over him by the end of the year.

Then Jane: No...how does Harry Potter end?

Now Jane: You cry for three hours.

Then Jane: Yeah.  I thought so.

Finis.