Coming of Age with the ‘Toy Story’ Movies
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-related topics.
The original Toy Story represents one of the most significant moments in modern filmmaking, revolutionizing computer animation technology and laying the foundation for one of the major forces in family-friendly storytelling for the next 30+ years. Powered by the kind of imagination that can only be found in a child’s toybox, the adventures of Buzz and Woody quickly captured the attention and admiration that helped it become an inextricable piece of popular culture.
At least, that’s how I’ve come to understand it.
It’s not an exaggeration to say I cannot imagine a world without Toy Story. Though it came out years before I was born, by the time I was finally introduced to it, I immediately held it with the same reverence that my new green alien friends had for “The Claw”. Watching these toys navigate the new space ranger in Andy’s room quickly grew to a full-blown fascination for me, complete with Buzz and Woody toys of my own, a cowboy hat, boots, and a diaper becoming my signature outfit, and even an earnest request to name one of my new siblings Mr. Potato Head.
When He Loved Toy Story 2
In the same way that the first Toy Story became a critical part of my life, both in capturing my complete attention and to reliably give my parents a way to keep me at bay, Toy Story 2 brought another set of adventures and characters to expand the world that I had so embraced. Bringing Jessie and Bullseye into the fold was particularly important to me, narratively, of course, but also in adding to my own toy box and continuing to fuel the stories I could create with these new friends of mine.
This quickly became my Toy Story movie of choice and the recipient of countless VCR rewinds. While the more nuanced themes and in-jokes were lost on me (the “I am your father” bit was introduced to me by Zurg well before Darth Vader had a chance), the charm of these movies continued to reel me in and had me stamped as a fan for life.
Revisiting these movies over the years became a welcomed return to see old pals and take something new away from them every time. While I couldn’t possibly pinpoint which aspects of the story I had been internalizing, I felt a real sense of comfort in revisiting fundamental lessons on friendship and compromise that Buzz and Woody had spent years showing me, along with the discovery that I had reached a level of humor to really appreciate the film’s top-tier blooper reel.
The Fiery and Formative Toy Story 3
Fast forward to 2010. Now with the sensibilities of a preteen on the cusp of junior high and a developed sense of object permanence that was missing from my earliest Toy Story watches, Toy Story 3 marked a chance to see these characters on the big screen for the first time and one of my first real memories feeling the building anticipation for a film. At this point, the Disney/Pixar corporate machine was operating at full force, and the marketing rollout was filling my house and classrooms with a tangible excitement for our movie of the summer (sorry, Iron Man 2). I can still remember my friends and our families filing into an overflowing theater on opening weekend, rushing to the carpeted floors directly below the screen to secure a very literal front row seat.
What was waiting for us had all of the charm and laughter we had been anticipating, but the experience of Toy Story 3 also introduced a set of real stakes and complex emotions I had rarely grappled with up to that point. The collective gasps and spiking pulses as the toys accepted their fate while inching towards a fiery end is a feeling that has scarcely been replicated for me in a theater to this day, only to be followed by the emotional sledgehammer of Andy’s final goodbye. Getting exposure to the feelings of loss that comes from change and having the opportunity to close the book with these friends that shaped my earliest days was a massively formative trip to the movies—even if 11 year old me couldn’t quite articulate it as one.
A Fresh Start in Toy Story 4
For all the warm feelings I had for Toy Story 3 and its virtually perfect conclusion, I met the news of another Toy Story follow-up with equal parts ambivalence and annoyance. It felt as though my sacred franchise was being dug up for nothing more than another cash grab on the march toward the precipice of studio-driven sequel exhaustion—you know, the kind of high-minded cynicism you might expect from a 20 year old college student. My own meh attitude, paired with the fear about what this new film might do to tarnish the legacy built by the previous three films, meant that I wasn’t exactly approaching Toy Story 4 with an open mind.
Fortunately, the film I was met with was a much warmer, funnier, and thoughtful experience than I deserved with an attitude like that. Toy Story 4 dropped Buzz, Woody, and company into a much bigger world, expanding the cast of characters to its furthest expanses thus far and delivering some of the biggest laughs of the entire franchise, in no small part from Forky’s self-deprecating sensibilities in the middle of his identity crisis.
Watching new characters find their own way while Woody grappled with his changing surroundings, his relationships, and ultimately his place in the world is the type of pitch I would’ve been ready to write off. Didn’t we already get our closure? As it turned out, getting another story with these friends and watching them find their inner voices—figuratively and literally—was exactly the kind of comforting return to form that seemed to find me at just the right time. It felt like there was new life in the series once again, like there were more stories worth telling after all.
Toy Story 5? It’s About Time
I’m happy to report that I had (mostly) worked the studio-meddling panic out of my system by the time Toy Story 5 was announced, and instead had shifted toward a glass-half-full reassurance that the toys would only be deployed to tell the kind of story that felt necessary. So when the advertising rollout centered Jessie in the story facing the looming threat of screen time replacing play time, paired with a really quite good original song from one of music’s biggest stars in Taylor Swift, I felt cautiously optimistic that Pixar knew they would be doing justice to these characters once again.
And while I can acknowledge that I sat down ready to watch through nostalgia-tinted lenses, what I found in Toy Story 5 felt assuredly of-the-moment, pitting the newly appointed sheriff Jessie against the creep of technology that threatens to shake up Bonnie’s room and leave the toys without a place in her life, all the while fighting back her own fears about being left behind again. The film continued to largely dodge the paint-by-numbers feel that plagued many sequels of its same kind by finding new territory for these toys, this time placing them squarely in the middle of a battle between the anxieties of growing up and confronting their own sense of purpose in a world of newly encroaching technology.
Peppered with real humor throughout—Conan O’Brien is hilarious as a potty training gadget—there were almost as many genuine laugh moments for the adults as there were for the kids in my theater. What I foolishly didn’t expect was the exact level of heart that another rehashing of these stories could dish out. Acting as a sort of coda for her own heartbreaking backstory introduced in Toy Story 2, Jessie’s deeply felt desperation to fight against lost time had me bowled over by how much I resonated with those same fears and the crucial reminder that it’s not about the amount of time you have, but what you do with it.
It felt as though I reached a full-circle moment with the franchise, trying to reconcile for myself the pure sentimentality I carry while also appreciating the ability these films have to imbue so much heart into these anthropomorphized toys. I left the theater with a renewed appreciation for the Toy Story franchise and its unique superpower to leave me with something, whether I was 7 or 27. Far beyond me to decide if there will, or should, be other adventures for this band of characters, but I had the reassurance that I still have friends like Buzz, Woody, and Jessie growing and learning alongside me even after all this time.