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Toys and Their Boys

There are screening experiences that stick with you for years, decades, and, sometimes, the rest of your life. There's the first time you see that defining favorite movie that doesn't degrade in enjoyment as you age. There's your first movie out with a date. There's the first time you see something really memorable once you're out in the world on your own, away from home (whatever that means to you). I had a pair of these for the same movie a couple of weeks apart. The movie in question was Toy Story 3.

The act of leaving home is what prompts the existence of the third (and presumed to be final) Toy Story feature. Andy is going to college. The toys face an uncertain future. There's a tremendous adventure to be had, finding out where Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and the gang go from here. More than once, characters look at one another as if they may never see each other again.

Staying outside spoiler territory, I can only mention that there is a moment of profound dread and potential tragedy in Toy Story 3. It's cited as one of the most wrenching moments in Pixar history by friends, reviewers, commenters, and frankly, anyone who has seen it. Whether a parent wondering if it's "too scary" for their child or a grown man who chokes up at the mere recollection, it is the moment upon which the film hinges. The entire series thus far lays down all the chips its won over the last fifteen years. Pixar bets the house on these inanimate objects that have their own little world, and the box office returns have shown it to have been a shrewd move indeed.

A few weeks ago, I was racing to the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum IMAX (whew, what a name!) to catch an advance screening of Toy Story 3 with my wife. I answered a call from my mom just after I took the exit off of the highway. She asked me if I was driving, and I told her, "yes, why?" She told me that there was news about my brother and that she didn't want me to be driving when she told me. Whenever someone tells you this, you immediately know that the "news" is not that they won the lottery, or a new TV, or a private jet. This is especially clear when you can hear your mother's voice audibly trembling. He'd had what we thought was whooping cough or bronchitis for weeks. I told her to just tell me.

Thus, I found out that my brother had a lump the size of a grapefruit in his chest just minutes before arriving to see Toy Story 3. At the time, we didn't know it was cancerous, or a rare and hard-to-treat germ cell tumor, or that it had spread to his lungs and his bones. What we did know was that it could not possibly be good that it had gone untreated for weeks and weeks. The only "benefit" of these kinds of revelations is heightened clarity that lasts for a while.

We parked, I told my wife what my mother had told me, and I exhaled more deeply than I had in a long time. It had probably been since one of my best friends died of brain cancer early the year before. What followed, as I remember it, was like a music-backed montage in a Hollywood movie.

We walked in silence down the street to the theatre. We got in line behind a bunch of people who we didn't know. I saw a friend ahead of us. I sent an obnoxiously sarcastic text. We waved, and I said something or another. He couldn't hear me, I couldn't hear him. He motioned that we'd chat inside (or later), or something. The line moved a few times. We were right near the door, and the July Texas heat was positively baking us.

I looked up to the gargantuan Toy Story 3 banner on the face of the building. I looked up past it, to the sky and scattered, wispy cloud cover. My mind drifted to the lyrics of "Being Alive" from Stephen Sondheim's Company. I thought about how tragic it is that most people read Bobby as merely longing for romantic companionship. Sondheim has never been that simple. If you ask me, he's howling out his loneliness from the deep emotional bunker into which he's dug himself. He feels alone in the universe. I drifted again, thinking about "Alone in the Universe", a song in a musical called Seussical, a show that is surprisingly moving. The line moved again.

Just as we got inside the door, I spotted a good friend talking and playing with his young son in the line for popcorn. Everything slows down, and I felt my heart pull on my throat, urging me to cry. He lifted his son gently and playfully by both of his rubbery little kid arms up into a full-on bear hug. The boy giggled from his father's voice tickling his ears.

Something as boring and slow and pointless as waiting in a line for baked vegetable kernels covered in cholesterol is an opportunity for joy in a young kid's life. It's one of those hopelessly mundane things that's heightened to mythic levels when you look back on it. At this little guy's age, playing with toys (or are they playing with you?) is no better than the love and attention of a parent.

We walked inside to an auditorium filled with more children than adults. Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles introduced the film briefly and politely asked the children to be as quiet as possible during the movie. The movie rolled, and save a few odd moments of 3D (due to where I was seated), it went off swimmingly. My eyes watered and the dam broke with one subtle movement of Buzz Lightyear's chin late in the picture.

Weeks passed. Nights went by without sleep. Time passed quicker than ever, but at once, every minute of every day felt like forever in the moment.

My wife and I recently spent a few days with my mom, my dad, and my brother when he had his chemotherapy port installed. My mother and I have relied on Iron Man analogies to explain what the port is to him in terms he understands. In case you haven't read other articles I've written about my family, I should mention here that he's autistic. It also helps to know that my father is unable to speak intelligibly and is wheelchair-bound from a stroke in late 2008. My brother knows that he feels rotten and is very sick, but he doesn't comprehend or know how grave things are. Nor is he aware of the very low survival statistic they've given him.

We left the hospital so late and so exhausted that there was no way we could drive back that evening. This presented the opportunity to take my brother and my mom to see Toy Story 3, which he had been very insistent about seeing. He's loved the series ever since he got and promptly wore out his first VHS tape of Toy Story. That one scene toward the end of TS3 prompted me to tell my mom to hold off taking him until I could be with them.

We got there for the earliest show possible, overpaid for our "IMAX" (multiplex faux-IMAX, that is) 3D tickets, and went in. There was lots of child noise, as this was a weekday morning "crybaby" screening, which suited my brother's tendency to talk often and not so quietly. I'm generally monk-like with my devotion to the "no one talks in church" standards of moviegoing, but that all goes out the window when I'm with him.

One of my favorite additions that he made to the soundtrack was in the opening, when Rex appears and he exclaimed "Look out! It's a Tyrannosaurus Rex!!!". The second was when mention was made of what Lotso smells like, and he asked me, "Does he smell like strawberries? Mmm! I like strawberries.". My brother absolutely loves fresh strawberries.

The moment I dreaded was the scene late in the film, which I've mentioned time after time by now. At a critical moment, his brow furrowed and he became very agitated "[They're] not gonna DIE. Nope--" and then something else happened and he dropped it. To him, everyone lives forever and has everything they could ever want. He knows in his heart that someday, all the mean people will disappear, too. He insists on holding out hope that eventually, those dreams will come true.

He really enjoyed the movie tremendously. He kept making comments about the big opening sequence while we stood by the side aisle watching the credits. He asked me "when do we get the bear? What's his name?". I told him "Lotso. We'll try to get one soon. We have to pay for your medicine first." "Okay, deal." he said.

He put his arm around my shoulder, completely unprompted. I asked if he liked the movie. He said "Yes, he did". He often refers to himself using third-person pronouns. In public, most people treat his "improper" nature as the human embodiment of a third-world country. They look at him like Frankenstein's Monster, as some parents did as they exited.

I asked him if it was better than another CG animated movie he'd seen recently. His response? "I like Toy Story 3, it's good. When do we get the toys?" Iasked if he wanted to see the other movie again. He said, "When do we get the Toy Story 3 Blu-ray and DVD Combo Pack?" When he loves something, he really loves it.

I cherish Toy Story 3 thanks to the specific circumstances of these two viewings, and I'm fine with that. I disagree with anyone who insists that critics or anyone swear off all emotion and personal attachment when evaluating a film. What are we supposed to be, Vulcans? Personalized reactions like mine are the reason we go to see movies in the first place. For me, the movies have always been a dreamlike escape that (ideally) finds ways to touch you at the core. Pixar doesn't need to patent their process for that. It seems that these days, they're the only ones who actually start and end with that goal in mind.