How to Read a Toy Story
When Toy Story 4 was released in the summer of 2019, my good friend Robert Brown wrote a lengthy two-part essay series for FilmFisher detailing the Toy Story movies’ teleological themes, arguing that the first three films advanced a moral-philosophical vision which was then betrayed by the fourth. It is a remarkable piece of writing, lucidly written and attentive to detail, using animated children’s movies as a springboard to reflect on our own telos as human beings, and it helps me to appreciate the first three Toy Story films even more greatly than I already did. There is only one problem:
Toy Story 4 is really, really, really good.
I love Robert’s reading of the films as an extended reflection on vocation. But I also love how Toy Story 4 reflects the reality that vocations change with the seasons of life.
The Toy Story films have always been very flexible with their metaphors, and this fluid applicability is part of what makes them such potent stories – as distinct from allegories, stories in which each part bears a 1:1 relationship to something in reality. In The Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan = Jesus. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf obliquely reflect different aspects of Jesus, but the metaphor breaks down if you take it too far, and that’s OK.1
Toy Story is the latter kind of story. The existential crises of the toys, and their defining relationships with the children who play with them, variously evoke all manner of human experiences. Perhaps most centrally, the toy-child relationship is suggestive of a parent-child relationship, though even that layer of metaphor is hard to pin down because it works both ways (sometimes the toys are the children and the children are their parents, as when the toys yearn for the children to give them their attention; more often the toys are the parents, diligently but invisibly looking after their children’s well-being). In the first film, Woody’s anxiety about the advent of Buzz Lightyear evokes the emotional disruption an older child might experience when a new sibling enters the family and takes up all the parents’ attention – though it also evokes the fear of a top-performing employee worried that he will lose his comfortable place in the office hierarchy to a flashy up-and-comer.
Matt Zoller Seitz articulates this slippery quality nicely in his review of Toy Story 4:
Also in “Toy Story” tradition—perhaps more so than ever—this entry is flexible in its metaphors, in the way that dreams are flexible: i.e., a character or storyline can mean more than one thing at the same time. This allows the viewers to imprint their fears and dreams onto the material, and subtly change how they read a moment without contradicting themselves (or worrying that movie is contradicting itself).
In other words, much of the power of the Toy Story films is wound up in their rarefied ability to prismatically reflect all manner of universal human experiences in an almost subconscious way, which is more emotionally disarming than if they simply depicted those experiences directly – and as such, they can resonate differently based on what experiences are most on a viewer’s mind and heart at a given moment in time.
This week, I only had the time to revisit one Toy Story movie before the release of Toy Story 5. The choice was an easy one. I have been in a season of vocational upheaval since I made the decision to step away from my teaching career almost exactly one year ago, and last weekend, my best friend, who I have known since preschool, was married – so of course I was going to watch the Toy Story where Woody leaves his best friend to cleave to the woman he loves, all the while dealing with his disoriented sense of vocation in the wake of the realization that it is no longer his responsibility to care for a child. Toy Story 4 did not map onto my life in any 1:1 way, nor did it offer me a neatly defined moral-philosophical explanation for my experience; but it met me where I am, and I gratefully admire any work of art that can do just that.
Is this an objective judgment? Not particularly2 – but why watch a movie objectively when you can watch the whole thing through a haze of tears?
If Pixar has made an allegorical movie, in which the characters are metaphors, it is not Toy Story but Inside Out (Joy = Joy, Sadness = Sadness, and so on). Not coincidentally, I do not share the great love many people have for Inside Out. It says true and beautiful things which are worth hearing, but in many ways, it is more of a message delivery system than a compelling story.
Though if we’re talking about “objective” artistic metrics, let it be said that Toy Story 4 is, simply put, a great movie: about as deliriously playful and achingly heartfelt as any of its three formidable predecessors, and as delightfully jam-packed with off-the-wall references to cinema history (from The Shining to Taxi Driver to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and oh, yeah, the whole thing ingeniously plays on the fact that Bo Peep already looks like Grace Kelly to deliver a Pixar twist on High Noon, the classic western about a lawman who hangs up his badge when he gets married). It is also Pixar’s second most heart-stoppingly romantic film (after Wall•E). And, it is one of the most gorgeous computer animated films ever made, to boot.