By the time I was maybe 13 or 14, I didn't have toys anymore. I'm not sure what my parents did with them, nor do I really care.
I liked setting elaborate battle scenarios with my G.I. Joe/Star Wars guys. (And they were always guys; I'm pretty sure Princess Leia never made it into my vast collection.) But at a certain point, I just sort of forgot about them.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying I'm apparently the only adult male in Ameirca to have seen Toy Story 3 and not left the theater weeping, or even a little misty eyed.
Don't get me wrong: it was great, like everything else I've seen from Pixar. And it's not like the studio's other films don't have the power to move me. The wordless opening sequence of Up is one of the most affecting things I've ever seen in any movie, cartoon or otherwise. And the day after seeing Toy Story 3, I went back and watched the first one, and found myself with a little catch in my throat during the moment at the end when Buzz spreads his wings and flies.
And I found myself very scared -- and then very, very relieved for the toys during TS3's landfill climax, in which the Things-Always-Turn-Out-OK-in-Pixar-Movies part of my brain seemed to go on vacation, replaced by the newly-found This-Is-Terrifying-Why-Is-This-G-Rated? lobe. Yet when the end came, and goodbyes were said, and the toys moved onto a new life, I wasn't exactly weepy or choked up.
I think it comes down to the fact that while I liked having toys, and playing with them, none of what I had was exactly cherished. I don't remember a favorite (I had a teddy bear when I was much younger, but it's not like I had him embarking on any adventures of the Buzz/Woody variety). I mean, Boba Fett was cool and all, as was Yoda, and I dug Vader's cape, but that's about all.
Now that I think about it, when I played with Star Wars toys, they did Star Wars stuff. When I got out my G.I. Joe figures, they did G.I. Joe stuff, and so on. I like to think I have a strong, versatile imagination, but most of my flights of fancy as a kid came from books, and not from my toys, which all seemed to be off-shoots of movies or TV shows (TV shows made to sell the toys I played with). They were characters starring in spin-offs of their own stories, and I was simply their director. They were never my friends.
Maybe I'd relate better to Book Story than Toy Story, but I doubt even Pixar could get that one greenlit. And to be fair, if I knew Yoda and Boba Fett had wound up with the same fate the Toy Story toys narrowly escaped from, I might feel a little bad, even after all this time.
Tom Coombe
Posted by: |