Fifteen years earlier, the original Toy Story had been a delightful cinematic Hail Mary. It took a whole lot of corporate machinations before Toy Story 3 could fuck around with people’s feelings on that level.
We’d all be lucky to go out like that, and the beauty of the moment allows you to forget, for just a second, that you are watching a lucrative global children’s-entertainment franchise and not a bleak European art film. They wordlessly accept what’s about to happen, holding plastic hands and giving one another whatever comfort they can offer. In the film’s climactic scene, the one where the toys are all sliding downward toward doom, these inexplicable sentient beings all exhibit absolute dignity and absolute love. Toy Story 3 won’t let you ponder those questions because it’s too busy power-bombing your inner child through a flaming table. Are those atoms then sentenced to a hell of eternal frustration? For instance: Can a toy die? What does it mean to die if you don’t have any biological functions in the first place? When your detached body parts can operate independently of one another, is death itself merely a construct? Will all your immolated atoms go on to lives of their own? And will those atoms live out their lives hoping that children will play with them? Children can’t play with atoms.
If you start thinking too hard, you might start asking difficult questions. Toy Story 3, like so many Pixar films, preys on your emotions.