More than just toys: How Toy Story beautifully explores issues of abandonment (video essay)

(image courtesy IMP Awards)

No one likes to be abandoned or neglected.

It cuts to the very core of our self-worth and lovability and the even the prospect of it, quite understandably, leaves us quaking in our existential boots.

The same goes for the toys of Pixar’s Toy Story series, says Isaac of The Take by Screenprism in a movingly-incisive video essay, who live daily with the end of everything they know and love, with the very real chance that this could be the day that the child who plays with them, loses interest and relegates them to that cruel, almost inevitable place of non-relevancy.

It’s a theme that explored again and again with good humour sure – witness Rex getting upset in the first Toy Story film that he might be replaced by a cooler, more badass dinosaur – but also with a real, poignant understanding of what it is to live with the certainty that one day the playing will stop, the adoration will cease, and the toy/s will end up in storage (remember how much Jessie feared that in Toy Story 2?), or worse, discarded and sent off to a daycare facility, or gasp!, thrown away.

That’s got to do something to a toyroom, and it does, with Toy Story exploring the emotional truth of this in ways that are so emotionally evocative you ache with sadness and fear right along with the toys.

(source: Laughing Squid)

Related Post