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JOSEPH REISERT: ‘Toy Story 3’ a summer movie that’s art, not just entertainment

Most summer movies are mere entertainment. “Toy Story 3,” however, is art.

I have nothing against entertainment. Give me something attractive to look at, a sympathetic hero and a scary villain, throw in a high-speed chase and some simulated violence, and I’ll happily sit back and enjoy the fun.

Art does more than please the senses; it speaks to the soul. In the presence of art, we take not only pleasure in the details that constitute a particular work’s superficial attractiveness, we also learn something universally true about what it means to be human, especially in our relationships with God and nature, and in the moral content of our human relationships.

It is a testament to the skill and talent of the team behind “Toy Story 3” that their cast of computer-animated toys, and a couple of digitally rendered human beings, not only entertains, but also offers profound reflections about friendship and loyalty, love and mortality, and the centrality of imagination to the moral life.

As the movie opens, we find ourselves in the midst of a madcap chase scene. Sheriff Woody is out to foil the evil plans of One-Eyed Bart (aka Mr. Potato Head). Just as Woody seems to get the upper hand, in comes Mrs. Potato Head as Bart’s partner in crime. When Woody gets in trouble, his allies arrive.

More toys, as new heroes and villains, and new elements to the adventure are progressively added until we realize, at the climax, that what we have been watching has been going on inside the head of an 11-year-old Andy, playing in his room with his toys.

So it was once for Andy and the toys, but now Andy is preparing to leave for college. Though the toys scheme to get him to play with them again as he once did, he’s no longer interested in childish things. Unwilling to cast his childhood wholly aside, Andy plans to keep most of the toys in his parents’ attic; Woody, his favorite, he will bring to college.

By accident, the toys end up not in the attic, but at a daycare center. Woody insists that it is the toys’ duty as loyal friends to stay with Andy no matter what; to wait for him in the attic if that is what he asks of them.

The others, however, see their task as complete. Andy has grown up and moved on, and they must do so, too. They pledge their loyalty to one another, and sacrifice their own advantage to the welfare of their friends.

Woody, however, sees his friends’ decision as a betrayal, because he cannot see or refuses to accept that Andy could no longer need him. When he learns that the daycare center is not a paradise but a prison, Woody is prepared to risk being lost to Andy in order to save his friends, and, in one of the film’s most powerful scenes, the friends confront their fate with dignity, holding hands and taking solace in their mutual friendship.

Only after Woody witnesses the difficulty Andy’s mom has in letting her son leave for college does he understand that his love for Andy is not the friendship of equals, which demands the kind of unconditional attachment he had shown his friends. His love for Andy requires that he allow the boy to grow up, without him.

To love a child is to prepare that child for independence and adulthood — and thus the painful rupturing of the comfortable childhood relationship of dependence, which we may hope but cannot know will become a new and mature relationship.

That act of letting go demands a kind of creative, moral imagination. Woody and Andy’s mom both must be able to imagine Andy continuing his own story, and Woody must be able to envision a new future for himself and act to bring that future about.

In the film’s beautiful final scene, Andy introduces a younger child to the world of imagination he had created — thus enacting on screen what this wonderful piece of art accomplished for its audience: the creation of a new, moral community through the magical sharing of steadfast friendship and quasi-paternal love.



Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American Constitutional Law and chairman of the Department of Government at Colby College in Waterville.

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