By now you’d think we’d have this love thing pretty well defined. Shakespeare seemed to have the emotion, in all its many forms, nailed down nearly five hundred years ago. We know that love can be romantic, passionate, and lustful, the way it is when you’ve fallen for someone new. Love can be protective and patient, as it is between a parent and a child. Love can be loyal and true, dependable and kind, the way it is between close friends. After thousands of years as a species there shouldn’t any surprises left inside the heart of mankind, but I think Pixar has discovered something Shakespeare missed.
In Toy Story 3, a story that’s been decades in the making finally comes to completion, and culminates not in a fight scene or a stirring speech, but in what feels like a new kind of love. The Toy Story franchise ends in a few perfect moments, a final goodbye, a last expression of that new, heart-wrenching feeling. What do I call this lump in my throat? Can we really love an inanimate object as truly as Andy seems to love Woody? Can an inanimate object love us back? Toy Story 3 makes a rather convincing case for the affirmative. Does it really matter? It feels like it does.
It matters because it isn’t really the toy we love, but what it represents. Toy Story 3 begins not in Andy’s room but inside Andy’s imagination. Woody’s in a race to save the day, and it’s as if he’s been launched straight into the wild west. There’s a train robbery, a desert cliff, and a race against time. For a few beautiful moments, we see what Andy sees when he plays with Woody, the worlds his cowboy pal unlocks, and the places that takes him. And it’s imagination that Pixar loves, and imagination that we’ve fallen so desperately in love with over the course of these films. Yet it’s even more than that here. Toy Story 3 takes it even further, it’s a movie in love with life, and the memories of life, and all the heartaches, and changes, and beautiful, wonderful, happy times that happen and the ways in which they’ll never be forgotten.
Happiness can’t last forever, if it did, it wouldn’t seem as happy. Andy has grown up and in the process he’s outgrown his toys. Some of them have been lost along the way and the few toys that remain in his all but forgotten toy box are no longer brought out for play. They understand. So as Andy prepares to leave home for college the toys that remain prepare for a retirement to the attic, hoping for a new life some day when they’ll play with Andy’s kids. There’s something effortlessly beautiful in that notion. Woody is determined to be there for Andy, even if being there for him means waiting, and waiting, for decades in an attic. He’ll do it, happily, and never ask for anything in return.
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