The Toy Story of our lives

A few weeks ago, Pixar announced that Toy Story 4 is officially in production, with the dream team of John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Andrew Stanton advising the writing duo of Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. (I don’t doubt the talents of the latter two, but I still smile a little at the thought of that meeting: I’d like to think that it consisted mostly of four big, nerdy guys in Hawaiian shirts being inexplicably charmed by Jones’s pitch for the franchise.) Like many fans of what I’ve come to see as the best series of children’s films ever made, I’m tickled, but cautious. It’s not so much the fear that a mediocre fourth movie would undermine my feelings for the first three—heck, I’ve been through that process before. Rather, it’s the fact that a perfectly fine arrangement already exists, in the form of the animated shorts about these characters that Pixar has continued to produce. I’m not sure I need to see Toy Story 4, but I’d happily accept a run of shorts that went on forever, if it means we get more miniature masterpieces along the lines of Partysaurus Rex.

The nice thing about the Toy Story shorts is that they meet a particular need while leaving our memories of the movies untouched. Much of the appeal of these films comes from their almost frightening emotional resonance, and while it’s unfair to hold a short cartoon to the same standard, I love these characters so much that I’m glad just to be treated to a few brief vignettes of their lives. As we learned from Cars 2, cleverness alone can’t sustain an entire feature, but it’s more than enough to fill six minutes, and the format of the animated short allows Pixar to revel in a few crucial aspects of the franchise—its ingenuity and humor—while not having to strain for the intensity of feeling that the movies achieve. In that regard, it’s revealing that the longer specials, Toy Story of Terror and last night’s Toy Story That Time Forgot, tend to hit beats that we’ve seen before: the villain in the former feels more than a little like his counterpart in Toy Story 2, and the latter introduces an army of toys who don’t know that they’re toys, of which Buzz drily notes: “Incredible, isn’t it?”

More than anything else, this is what gives me pause at the prospect of Toy Story 4. The first three movies seem almost inevitable in the emotional ground they cover: the series gradually became a meditation on growing up, and now that Andy has gone off to college, it’s hard to envision what remains to be told. Still, I’ve been surprised before, and if anything, Toy Story That Time Forgot serves as a reminder of how much feeling can still be plumbed from these characters and their situations. For most of its length, it’s a cute diversion, maybe a notch below the best of the shorts so far. (It lost me a little during its long middle section, which takes place entirely within the plastic world of the Battlesaurs: a lot of the fun of these stories arises from the element of scale, with the toys’ adventures set against the baseboards and table legs of the larger everyday world, and we lose this when the action unfolds in artificial surroundings.) Yet by the end, I was unexpectedly touched by its message, like that of The Lego Movie, which implies that toys find their greatest meaning when they surrender to a child’s imagination.

Obviously, it’s hard to separate my response from my own experience as a father, which is a fairly recent development—my daughter wasn’t even born when Toy Story 3 was released. And I see a lot of Bonnie in Beatrix. She’s just arriving at the age when she starts to tell stories involving her toys that I couldn’t have anticipated: she’ll sling her Hello Kitty purse over her shoulder and announce that she’s taking the train to work, or explain that Mr. Bear needs to have his diaper changed, and she’s already beginning to spin private narratives using the figures in our plastic nativity set. And even if my feelings have been shaped by where I happen to be in my own life, I can’t help but think that if there’s one last region for the series to explore, it’s here—in the strange closeness that emerges between a child, her toys, and her parents. (So far, the series has only given us hints of this, notably in the form of the intriguing clues, which can’t be dismissed, that the little girl who gave away Jessie the Cowgirl grew up to be Andy’s mom.) Toy Story has a lot to say about small children, but it’s been oddly indifferent so far to families. That’s the fourth movie I’d like to see, and I’ll tell this to anyone who wants to listen, even if it means I have to take a meeting with Rashida Jones.

A boyhood at the movies

Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s question: “What’s your favorite movie of the year so far?”

I don’t think there’s another movie this year that I’ve been more excited to watch than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Anyone who has visited Linklater’s IMDb page over the last decade or so has been curious to see how this project—which he’s been filming off and on for more than twelve years—would turn out, and the rapturous response indicates that the wait has been worth it. I’ve always been deeply moved by depictions of growth and aging in film, whether imagined, as in The Last Temptation of Christ or Saving Private Ryan, or real, as in the wonderful documentary Ballets Russes, and Boyhood, which follows actor Ellar Coltrane as he ages before our eyes from grade school to college, seems like the ultimate realization of this theme, which the movies can depict so mysteriously. The irony, of course, is that I probably won’t see it for a while, because I have a daughter of my own at home. And I have a feeling that the viewers who would benefit the most from this movie—the parents of small children—will probably wait for it to show up on video, even as art houses are packed this weekend with twentysomethings with kids still in their future.

As I’ve noted here all too often, now that I’m a father, my moviegoing habits have been severely curtailed. (The only new films I’ve seen so far this year are The LEGO Movie and The Grand Budapest Hotel, both of which I liked, even if the parts in the latter seem just as interchangeable as those in the former—it’s the ultimate Wes Anderson construction set.) And while I’ve thought a great deal what this means for my love of movies now, it only recently occurred to me to consider its implications for my cinematic education in the past. When I look back at my life, it seems likely that I’ll have seen most of the movies I love in my teens and twenties, when I was single, possessed of disposable income, and willing to make the long trek to an independent theater or midnight screening. Those trips to the Brattle or the UC Theatre were a central part of my young adulthood, and the way I think about the movies was deeply shaped by my early experiences. In retrospect, I was lucky: the act of sitting in a darkened roomful of strangers to see a scratchy print of Ikiru seems increasingly remote from the lives of budding cinephiles, so I feel like I came along at just the right time.

But the fact that I saw so many of these movies when my firsthand knowledge of the world was so limited seems like an important factor as well. When you’re young and impressionable, you tend to be drawn to works of art that speak to you in a language you understand, either because they resonate with your own life or because they’re exhilarating on a formal or visceral level. As a teenager, I never had much interest in movies that reflected my life back to me—it took me years to get into John Hughes, for instance—but I fell in love with films that appealed to my senses in new ways. I was a devotee of Kubrick before I started middle school, largely because his virtues were the kind that I could immediately understand and admire: scope, symmetry, meticulousness, and intimate attention to image and sound. Even if you’ve never been out of your hometown or a narrow emotional comfort zone, you can react instinctively to films that thrill your eyes and ears. And the canon of my own favorite movies is still primarily a young man’s list, even if I’ve since come to appreciate the depths that the best of them conceal beneath their spectacular surfaces.

Of course, that’s the path that most of us follow: we’re drawn to the movies at a young age, gradually refine our tastes to look beyond their surface aspects, and end up with a personal pantheon populated both by old favorites and by films that we might have found difficult or uninviting at an earlier stage. At the moment, though, I sometimes fear that the process has been arrested for me just at the point when I’m ready to make new discoveries. The list of filmmakers who honestly confront the problems of marriage or old age is vanishingly small compared to those who construct beautiful fantasies, and even in the work of highly gifted directors, like Paul Thomas Anderson, we can sometimes sense enormous talent and will compensating for a lack of experience. It’s revealing that the most essential movie of them all, Citizen Kane, is a young man’s systematic impersonation of the old man he might one day become, and the difference between Welles as Kane and the incredible creation of his later years reminds us of how even the greatest movies can fail to predict what life has in store. Welles later made his aging a central part of his work, but far more of us have seen him in Kane than in Chimes at Midnight. And as we get older, as hard as it might be, it’s all the more crucial to make time for the films that speak to us now.