Cinecult: Ain't No Lobos

There ain't no Andy and if there is, he's a son of a bitch.

I just got out of Toy Story 3.

What I am surprised about is that I could feel this much emotion over a kid's film about toys. Their primary existence seems to revolve around being played with, which is a pretty bizarre concept, especially when you consider that there's a right way and a wrong way to be played with. I guess you could go down the rabbit hole with that one and talk about Descartes and the meaning of consiconess and blah blah blah. . . Or, well, at least I could disappear down the rabbit hole with something like that, at least for 500 words or so.

But, anyways, you basically have these characters with an almost religious devotion to Andy and yet, somehow, despite every logical reason on the books, I find myself crying over and over again. I'd like to think I do this with many movies and I'd like to think I'm more sensitive to films than most other people, but as a 23 year old man, I still find it a bit odd to be crying over toys.

Which is now where I'm going to disappear down the rabbit hole.

Toy Story 3, more or less is a film all films are more or less striving to be. It's a movie that uses what are basically lies to reach at a deeper truth. I was talking to my friend Cruz the other night and he was talking about The Killing Fields and how the journalist who wrote the non-fiction book would show the movie during his class. He would show it with the caveat that what is in the movie is not what happened, but what you get is what it felt like.

And that's what cinema is supposed to be about, and all art, I suppose. The poet, in whatever medium he is working in, is not supposed to literally reflect life back at the audience, but his job is to instead, reflect a reality back. A mediocre movie like Watchmen is about exactingly and literally throwing scenes, characters, lines, and images back at the audience without accounting for the fact that cinema works differently than comic books. It doesn't seek to forge a reality for the viewer, instead all it wants to do is regurgitate X number of scenes until we hit the two and a half hour mark.

There's plenty of ways to make a pointless movie, but I think one of the prime factors in all lame movies is that they don't know what the fuck a movie is capable of. It's got a certain grammar and a certain cadence and without disappearing up my own ass too much, I think I can say that Pixar gets it. They know how to make a beautiful, good looking story with wonderful characters, plotting, and a ton of jokes and they bring this all together to build to an idea that is bigger than the sum of its parts. I don't think people like Zack Snyder care about something like that and I'm fairly certain that they don't understand that something like that can even be accomplished. And, while I'm thinking about it, neither does an egomaniac like M. Night.

Toy Story 3 doesn't suffer from this blindness. It uses these ridiculous, fictitious characters to someone make an emotional and profound statement about mortality. It's making true art. Proper art. And even if you don't give a shit about the dynamics or the theories or the whatever behind movies, I think we can all more or less agree that there's something beautiful about a flick like Toy Story 3, which aspires to be and succeeds in being something more than a way to keep 10 year-olds busy for 100 minutes.