Free the Toys!

Does a wooden wind-up cowboy really have three movies worth of material in him? Surprisingly, yes. I thoroughly enjoyed Toy Story 3, and only wish that Woody, Buzz, and the others would stop being such, well, toys.
Toy Story 3 takes place around ten years after the second movie. Andy, the toy’s young owner, is about to head off to college, and he hasn’t played with them in years.  He has grown up from the spunky young kid who was only a formidable face in the first movie (when the 3D animation was not yet advanced enough to portray realistic hair), into a shaggy-haired teenager with some lurking childlike innocence.
While cleaning out for college, all the toys except Woody are unwittingly donated to Sunnyside Daycare, a place that at first seems like toy paradise. They get played with daily! There’s a nurturing community of toys! Then you look at your watch and realize that happy endings don’t happen after 45 minutes. In reality, Sunnyside is ruled by a stuffed bear named Lotso, who assigns new arrivals the preschool classroom, where they’re physically abused by the rough play of toddlers while toys who have been at Sunnyside longer get played with by the enlightened first graders.

Lotso’s regime is set up as totalitarian; he imprisons Andy’s toys at night and has them guarded by his thugs. Against this, Woody and his crew are freedom fighters for democracy; as Barbie declares with hilarious self-righteousness during their escape, “Authority should be determined by the consent of the governed and not by the threat of force!”
The problem with this little parable is that Woody and his friends impose a higher standard of behavior on their fellow toys, like Lotso, than they do their owner. Andy effectively abandoned them to a “sandbox” of sorts for many years. While he didn’t physically abuse them, they were certainly emotionally abused by his neglect and carelessness. When Buzz suggests that maybe it’s time to move on from Andy, Woody exclaims, “but we’re Andy’s toys!” as if Buzz were being disloyal instead of quite reasonably trying to shake off Stockholm syndrome. Is Andy’s “authority” derived from the fully informed, conscious consent of his toys? Being imprisoned in a preschool classroom does not seem so different from being trapped in Andy’s attic.
The message is that toys can only be empowered to an extent. A running thread through this Pixar trilogy has been that as adults we fail to take joy in toys and play. When the toys are forgotten so is a vital part of ourselves. But in Toy Story 3 the toys are never truly treated as equals, and thus the joy of childhood is held at an eternal arms length.
Photo Credit: Google Images