There was poker at O and S’s place last night, a table with many players and higher stakes from which I extracted myself with fairly minor bruises. I won a couple of hands and early on and didn’t slide too far in the the latter rounds. There was good food, good companionship and the shocking realization that I’ve been playing with these people for close to ten years if not more.
Before that I got taken to see Toy Story 3, a film I was interested in but had only middling expectations of. Boy, was I surprised. It did what I didn’t think could be done: which is to make the case for the emotional value of straightforward narrative movie making. It’s a big expensive, complex production, one that draws on the creative skills of many, many people, like an opera. And like an opera it made me care deeply about the fate of a group of manifestly artificial beings. It succeeded in doing so by not hedging its bets, by being willing to put its protagonists in great peril, both externally and internally and by asking deep questions.
The root of “animation” is “anima” the latin word for soul or wind. The characters in Toy Story are inanimate objects, supposedly soulless or lifeless except when moved by the children who play with them. Except they aren’t and the conceit of the movies has been that it’s only when humans aren’t around that the toys are free to express their souls. Over the course of the three movies Pixar has used this device to ask questions about the nature of love, of existence and of mortality. The first film was all about Woody conquering his jealousy and Buzz understanding that he was a toy, that is, a thing to be played with (a vehicle for love). The second film asked whether it was better to be fleetingly loved in proximity or eternally adored at a distance. The final film seems to me to ask two questions: what does death look like to an inanimate thing, and why do we have things like toys and art anyway?
The central love story in the films is the one between Woody and Andy, the “owner” who has remained pretty much a cipher for most of the films. In this one we finally hear what he thinks about Woody, not as a possession but as a person. And while the films have always traded on the excitement of seeing what our toys do when we’re not around, this one is bracketed by two sequences of children playing. The first is a breathless, increasingly absurd western adventure, shot like a classic cliffhanger with charging trains, explosions and dastardly deeds, that gradually reveals itself to be happening within the mind of Andy as he plays with his toys. From the beginning the link is made between movie making or story telling and play. Like Andy, the filmmakers have made up a story about a bunch of inanimate things, breathing life into them. The jovial spills and rescues of the first sequence return in the in the films most harrowing one where the characters are faced with an annihilation, a genuine abyss from which there is no return. This too is story telling, animation playing with non-living things. And yet the multiple emotions with which these collections of digital information seemed to regard their fates was enough to move me to tears. The first cliffhanger read as absurd, childish. The second as harrowing.
This happened because over the course of the three films the directors and artists and screenwriters have built up enormous good will towards these characters by taking them seriously as people. It’s really impressive the way that the animation has progressed, not in detail, but in nuance. That’s a result of craft, not processing power. Facial expressions, body movements each managed to be character driven and character revealing.
The final play sequence brings all of this back around by showing the way that story telling and play can be passed on from generation to generation. Why do we imagine that pieces of plastic have souls? Why do we “animate” them? Why are characters like Emma Bovary more real to us than those of the people in our offices? It’s because we need stories and toys to try to grasp the ungraspable, to attempt to deal with the knowledge that we too will cease, will become inanimate. The only way we will continue will be in what is said about us, in stories. Thus imagination is important, play is important invention is important. More important than we may have expected.
With each film Pixar seems to have been edging closer and closer to posing these bigger questions. It’s impressive to me how few missteps there are in this picture and how little of the crappy gags that mainstream film makers seem compelled to pepper their current movies with. There’s a lot more I could say about it, and I’m actually eager to see it again.
Tags: daily photo, film, movies, play, poker, Toy Story 3
That was really life affirming, thanks Nayland.