№ 394. Toy Story 4: To Infinity and Beyond

Back in grade school, I could not fully understand Velveteen Rabbit.

I couldn't really grasp the core idea in "What it means to be real?" The concepts of "love" and "real" were too mature for my young, less imaginative mind then.  It escaped me how these concepts translate in my life in school, home and play. It wasn't clear how these abstract concepts fuse with my experience, which was still very limited. These big ideas, to be sure, were simply beyond a ten-year old's imagination. At that time, the thesis and the story did not yet connect in my head.

Growing up, the life lessons made the ideas in Velveteen Rabbit no less slippery.

I thought the answer, which was written in the dialogue between the real bunny and the toy, was simple enough. But I also thought that the cliché too neatly tied up the kinks of a metaphor, which I suspected was far more than it appeared. I felt that the idea in the story mimicked the pop songs crooning about romantic love: love has the power to make things truly alive. These pop ideas are easy to enough to accept but somehow I knew they smooth out the rough maladies and many contradictions hiding under the hood.

CCP Art Exhibit

Flash forward three decades later, after we watched Toy Story 4.

It dawned on me that this movie and its prequels were the animated canvasses of the themes of Velveteen Rabbit. I had forgotten the rabbit bedtime story after so many years and did not make the connection to the pixar movies until the credits were rolling. Well, better one late realization than none at all.

"Toy Story 4 revisits the existential questions that arise when a toy outlives its usefulness, or when its utility changes.... If the first movie demonstrated the extremes to which toys might be exposed — contrasting the heaven of Andy’s room with the hell Sid puts them through — then this installment explores the idea of purgatory: What’s it like for a plaything to be ignored, overlooked or entirely unused? And to the extent that these characters have free will, at what point is it reasonable for them to privilege their own happiness above that of their owners?"

Origami display at the Miyajima Island Museum

The fourth movie expresses again in vivid, aching and deft tones the idea that, in fact, toys do have secret, very human, lives. These secret lives are tucked seamlessly beyond the watchful senses of their owners. Beyond the animating inspiration of the kids is a thriving wonderland--- alive, full of terrors, doubts, adventures and everything that populates the human experience.

Underneath the fundamental desire to be owned and loved by a child, the toys are also capable of the nobility. In their search for answers to their moral pinings, they take risks, make difficult choices and sacrifices. In Woody, we witness how a toy grows to the full potential of its nature. Through him, we can watch the idea, so artfully mirrored back to us, how a creature can transcend its own self-interest to look after the welfare of its owner and the growing community of its fellow toys. 

I thought Toy Story 3 put a very moving closure to the inevitables that burden real life. I was happy to leave the movie house eight years ago with that take home lesson.

The fourth paints the magic farther, deeper and wider. It cracks opens a new page to write and explore about the uncharted. The latest movie shows us that maybe, together with the painful inevitables, a new world can still unfold.  In this new world, the essential toys of our childhood are animated beyond the soul that we give them. They set out, without us, into adventures that are as infinite as our imagination can render in technicolor.

To infinity and beyond, Woody and friends! I hope there's going to be a fifth installment. Soon.