In the recent Toy Story film (Toy Story 5), we find the creators moving to tackle the quintessential modern crisis: our relationship to technology, and specifically the epidemics of addiction and social/psychological illness it has created for the younger generations (not to mention the older ones still existing with one foot in both worlds).
This is not surpising. If one needed to find the natural progression of this story, a series that has, in it’s own way, found itself straddling these lines of conversation between the different generational contexts of it’s own time weathered longevity, this would be the conversation that we need to have today. And it does an admirable job of taking on this challenge, often rising to the same level of inspired storytelling it has become lovingly known for. I know there exists some (I would argue unfortunate) resistance and cynycism surrounding the fourth installment, with some seeing it as an infringement on what is often called the perfect trilogy with the perfect end to a perfect story, but what might lend this one a greater degree of grace is that it doesn’t impede on that trilogies prior existence. If the fourth was seen more as an epilogue, needing to add to that trilogy in some way, ways that some see as uneccessary, the fifth film is in many ways occupying it’s own portion of the story and doing it’s own thing in it’s own time.
What might be suprising, or overlooked, is the fact that this recontextualizing is neverthless drawing on the same patterns and cycles that made the original trilogy so resonant. At it’s core, the film is dealing with the same crisis and the same questions that it has been asking from the start: how do we deal with the loss that growing up represents.
As I was watching this film, my mind kept wandering back to a recently released book I’m in the process of reading by Mac Barnett titled Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children. In his introduction, Barnett describes the target audience as the following:
“This is a book for adults. More specifically, this is a book for adults about books for children.”
If this is indeed who the book is written for, Barnett goes on to suggest that the main thesis comes down to this simple question: what is a children’s book. The part that kept coming to mind as I was watching Toy Story 5 comes from his fleshing out of this question.
Barnett first points out the interconnected relationship between adult and children’s books. By which he means the obvious but overlooked truism that the ones writing children’s literature are in fact adults. This not only denotes an existing power structure (the ones writing indeed hold power over the reader’s world), but underscores the often unexplored truth that this power means all children’s literature is an act of proselytization. This might feel uncomfortable to admit, but at it’s core, all books written by adults for children are book’s which see the world of the child through those adult eyes. If children come to encounter these stories as part of their formation, their cultural ethos, ultimatley being tasked with making it their own, the real danger comes from forgetting or negelecting the fact that this culture is the world the adults are handing to them.
Part of what Bartlett wants to do with this book is open up a conversation about this relationship. As he puts it, “There’s a gaping chasm between childhood and adulthood, and the children’s author must find some way across.” At least if they want to tell good children’s stories that reach for truth. In this way, the question “what is a children’t book,” a question that must resist the trappings of being sucked into reducing it to a simple genre, might be better posed as, “what is a children’s author.” A children’s book is, at it’s core, the product of an author deliberately navigating this existing chasm with awareness of that existing relationship between adult and child.
What this chasm is, as Bartlett does a wonderful job unpacking, flows from how it is that we grow up, “defining ourselves as older by rejecting the things we very recently loved.” I found this statement powerfully aware and astute. At the root of this is a certain existential crisis framed not only by the sense of loss that growing up represents, but by a governing narrative. We define ourselves by this underlying belief that to be an adult is somehow superior to being a child. To become something more than we were demands a rejection of the world we are leaving behind, and it’s worth noting largely because we want to be liberated to be the ones with power over it. And of course this includes this underlying belief that the point of growing up is to aquire greater knowledge of the world we inhabit. If a child sees the world one way, we grow to see it in a way that we believe is more real and more true, by which we usually mean “more factual.”
This doesn’t come out of nowhere. That governing narrative is the same modernist narrative that we find being depicted in Toy Story 5, and in fact in nearly every portion of our lives here in the West. A world where technological progress, and the utilitarian and scientific allegiances that drive it, is the point of a world that must grow up and reject the antiquated ways of a world once steeped in superstition and primitivism. It’s not simply that we find a world with this new “tech,” it’s that the myth of progress tells us this is the superior world, even going so far as to render it a kind of “moral” progress.
Here I would make the argument that Toy Story 5 rightly locates the existing tension, once again finding it’s symbolism in this world of toys being rejected and forgotten in favour of technological progress, or a world growing up and changing. This becomes the operative metaphor for the human narrative running underneath, that idea that growing up naturally means the loss of what came before. I would also argue the film finds the right concluding note, understanding that the issue runs deeper and requires us to dig underneath the more superficial exterior of that modern myth. There we uncover an idea that runs through all of the films, which is simply this idea that, for this world to matter, a world marked by this sense of constant change and this act of growing up, we have to be able to find something that is able to withstand this loss. We have to be able to anchor ourselves in some form of universal truth that can fight back against our rejection at the same time. A life built solely around the constant act of rebellion is a self defeating one.
If the film understands this, I think it also follows a pattern of much modernist storytelling, in that it fails to do the work of fully and rationally exploring the cognitive disonnance of these seemingly contradicting forces. At one point a main character in the film expresses, legitimately so, that they are tired of giving themselves to loving and caring for a child only to discover that their existence is ultimately proved meaningless. Everything fades away with the inevitable and constant pattern of rejection that adulthood needs and craves.
There is an easy sentiment brought in to colour over this disonnance in this moment in the film, which simply says the meaning comes from our participation in the present. Which is to say, everything is meaningful because it is feeding into what this world, or what someone is becoming. It is part of that bigger picture. And if you have seen the trilogy (which of ocurse you have), you will know this is very much the arc of those films as well. There is a problem though: the sentiment, when allowed to be held to the fires of logic and reason, that same adult reasoning that rejects childhood as a means of speaking to something true, collapses under the weight of it’s own conclusions, both acting without any true aim while also actively telling the past that it is a redundancy, a present that is meant to be done away because it is lesser. The brute truth of this belief is that it ultimate condemns our present as well, which is precisely the crisis this moment in the film is articulating. When we look at the ways we actually live and the ways we actually anchor ourselves in the midst of this disonnance, it betrays a failure to attend to this chasm that Bartlett is pointing out very much exists.
We cannot justify the act of growing up by justifying a narrative that rejects the legitimacy of our childhood. In the same way, we cannot pretend as though the myth of progress somehow solves or answers the very real truth that this cognitive disonnance uncovers. Two things can be true at once: we grow up, and likewise growing up presents a legitimate challenge to why all of this matters in the here and now.
Here I am going to say something that might be considered controversial, but it is to this end that I will continue to argue and believe that Toy Story 4 is still the most essential film of the series. Without Toy Story 4, this lingering crisis is left without a real and coherent means of being grappled with. The life of the toys at the end of Toy Story 3 indeed remain locked in the most strident and disillusioned and arguably ignored and unaddressed existential crisis: our ability to actually approach an answer to the question of why the toys matter in the first place. It’s a glaring inconsistency that the trilogy tables and then forgets, mainly through it’s appeal to a (albiet smartly drawn) sentimentality, soaked in this belief that growing up and fading away is the point, because it’s about change and progress.
An inconsistency Toy Story 4 is brave enough to face head on, not surprisingly being one of the key reasons, I think (my opinion of course), it got maligned and shoved aside by some. It pokes a hold in that modernist myth, and in doing so addresses the chasm between it’s very adult awareness of an essential childhood crisis.
That last statement is so important. As Bartlett poses in his book, “What if they (children) are in fact better equipped to engage deeply with stories than adults.” In a world where, in the language of Toy Story 5, play is about the imagination and make believe is about giving that imagination life in the confines of our minds, our created stories, make believe, properly rendered, is about forming a response to what we percieve to be true and real about this world we occupy. Far from my childhood self being distanced from this truth, the more years I live, indeed quickly encroaching on 50, the more I seek to recover the buried knowledge my childhood once made available. To grow up is to find ourselves resisting that childhood perspective (in the way of outgrowing that “baby” bed, or moving from elementary to middle grade… every point of growth comes from seeing and rejecting the thing that makes us lesser than in the eyes of our peers), and yet to grow old is to find ourselves in a process of needing to recover it, lest this whole thing come crashing down into that same sense of meaninglessness.
There is something else that was going through my head towards this same end as I was watching this film. On my way towards 50 I have planned what for me is a bucket list trip to England this summer. A bucket list trip in the way of returning to my own childhood by following in the footsteps of the children’s authors whom formed me. Of seeing the places and spaces that inspired them. What strikes me about this space, representing my family heritage, is the way it has existed in my own imagination as this liminal space between the old world myths and the modern ones. This indeed stands at that crossroads, with it’s stories continuiing to attend to that chasm.
Over the last couple years I have been reading so many books that have been echoing a similar need to return to and recover the stories that represent the childhood of our own modern, adult malaise on a historical and societal level. One that is covered up by our doubling down on our tightly held myth of progress and the constant rejection of the past that this demands. One that has indeed, for many of us, failed to rationally attend for the real questions that the lived life poses to our rational senses. If Toy story 5 isn’t quite willing to do the work, I do think it’s worthwhile pointing to it’s reigning image of something akin to universal truths running undetneath. It would be wrong, in my opinion, to suggest that this film would in any way be justifiying technological progress as either the enemy or the hero. Nor is it devolving into superficial sentiments that suggest “it’s simply how we use it.” It’s getting at something deeper. We can indeed speak to the loss of certain fundamental truths in this modern landscape. We can speak to the very real epidemics. We can speak to the very real crisis that growing old actually represents and not be shamed for doing so. But we can only do so by reaching into the past and being willing to give it credence. By being willing to say, maybe our childhood could see certain truths more clearly than our present adult, modernist position allows. That, I think, is an important message and one that more than justifies this film’s existence. After all, if Toy Story 4 is right, there’s a lot hanging in the balanace with that conversation, beginning with the question of why this existence means anything at all, and ending with the question of our lives being an invitation to particpate in the midst of that chasm, attending to the gaps of that experience.
The Stories of my Life 