Toy Story Is Proof That I Have A Heart

Toy Story 3 is not a children's movie...it's a movie for all the has-beens, the children that grew up and left childhood behind in the past eleven years. Four out of the five members of my family that saw it today cried--the only one who didn't is eleven years old, with a dollhouse made out of the entertainment unit and a collection of Bratz guaranteed to trip anyone who walks through the living room. This movie wasn't aimed at her, not yet.

It's a movie for tweenagers trying to forget their childhoods, straining to grow up but not quite there yet, and teens desperately scrambling back from the brink of adulthood and wondering where all that time went. Shown in snapshots of yesteryear that probably match the pictures on your mother's wall: Andy constructing fantasy lands out of linkin' logs and imagination, Andy asleep amidst a mountain of well loved toys that are, inevitably, forgotten in a dusty toybox. The toys scramble to hold onto what they've known; Andy grows up, forgets them, prepares to leave them in the attic with only one exception.

My own toys are gone: Barbies beheaded by a ten-year-old tomboy, toy cars crashed, action figures lost and left behind in multiple moves, a toy school bus that got dropped on the cat and was forgotten somewhere down along the line. There's no safe warm attic for them, they died in a dump somewhere. I have a collection of Breyer horses (missing hooves and legs, paint scratched, propped up against each other in the windowsill) and a pile of stuffed animals next to the bed, and nothing else. Somewhere there is a stuffed chihuahua with a pink bow tie named Mr. Snookums (you see, I've always been cruel) who went with me to Florida when I was ten and will no doubt go to college with me when I'm 18. No toddler is getting their grubby hands on these, they're mine, and I cried when Andy passed his off even though they went to a good home.

Andy grew up, went to college, and passed his childhood on to someone else...but it went out with a bang, and in doing so has made me want to cling to mine a little harder.