Toy Story." Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Cross, Karen. " Fear, Guilt and the Future of Play in Toy Story." Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature. By Susan Smith, Noel Brown and Sam Summers. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 141–152. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501324949.ch-009>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 18:16 UTC. Copyright © Susan Smith, Sam Summers and Noel Brown 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 1 41 Chapter 9 F EAR, GUILT AND THE FUTURE OF PLAY IN T OY STORY Karen Cross Although rarely considered of critical importance within the fi eld of media and cultural study, representations of childhood play form part of an important part of cinema heritage. Th is is particularly apparent in the case of Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), which, through its own particular depiction of play provides a critical insight into contemporary social and cultural concerns, which relate to the changing nature of family life, the role of new technologies and shift ing patterns of production and consumption, especially in response to ecological crisis. More specifi cally, and as this chapter seeks to show, the setting of play depicted within Toy Story forms a primary site for the creative expression and working through of fears and anxieties relating to loss – especially the loss of analogue materialities, something inherent in the computer- generated animation process. Th is allows the animation to be read as a means of re- establishing and normalizing mascu- line forms of cultural production, and as that which sustains patriarchal interests (especially through the use of heroic fi gures and storylines). However, my conten- tion here is that the particular setting of play depicted within Toy Story intends to draw attention to a deeper emotional landscape of transitional experience, which involves, but precedes masculine identifi cation. With this in mind, I employ a psy- choanalytic object- relations approach inspired by the work of Melanie Klein and Donald Woods Winnicott to help elaborate upon the precise emotional dynamics of mourning that the narrative of the fi lm represents. By doing so, I show how Toy Story represents a particular kind of transitional experience, which allows the gap between the past and present, analogue and digital, to be bridged, and thus the future of play and creative life to ultimately be ensured. Beyond Nostalgia Broadly speaking, Toy Story sits within the postmodern tradition of fi lm, which is evident from the various allusions it makes to other artistic sources, ranging from the paintings of Picasso to the horror movie genre, including such fi lms 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 114141 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:34:49:34 PPMM 142 142 Karen Cross as Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932) and Th e Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973). 1 Combined with the fact that the toys that appear within the fi lm will be famil- iar to adult audiences, this suggests a playful air of nostalgia and a clever use of important symbolic forms that relate to twentieth- century culture. It is impor- tant, then, that we think carefully about the particular memorial function that these references to the past perform. Toy Story reproduces the very same toys that were played with by the parents – on the verge of becoming the grandpar- ents – of the children that once formed the (putative) primary audience for the fi lm. Th us, the reappearance of toys from this era may suggest a circum- spect reattachment to the ideological attitudes and patterns of production of late- modernity. As the cultural theorist Roland Barthes argues, there is a sense in which mod- ern toys off er the child nothing more than ‘a microcosm of the adult world’, 2 in relation to which they have little option other than to become consumers and users, rather than taking on the role of producer. Th ey are that which rational- ize patterns of global consumption, certain forms of nationalism and involve limiting social attitudes relating to the performance of class and gender. Here, we can think of the early example of the pull- along telephone as prefi guring social mobility and the network of contemporary global communications; the soldier as rationalizing modern warfare and commitment to the nation; and the baby doll and toy kitchen as providing a space for the young girl to accept her future role as a mother.3 Th us, the reappearance of toys that connect with this history within Toy Story implies an investment within the ideals that once framed this setting of play. As Paul Wells has written, however, Toy Story seeks to ‘reconcile the per- sonal and experimental with the popular and generic’.4 Th e use of toys provides a chance to bridge the apparently opposed forces of new digital techniques of production with something highly familiar and known. Th ere are also the prac- ticalities of technique to consider. As John Lasseter has described, the initial lack of success with animating the human form is what led to the idea to build a narrative around toys. Th e forms chosen were supposedly those that worked best with the processes available at the time.5 Th e limitations of the medium resulted in the anthropomorphic performance wherein toys speak as if they are human. Some suggest that this represents a problematic power dynamic in which ownership, notably signifi ed through the inscription of the child’s name on the feet of his toys, refers us to a history of slavery and commodity fetishism. It would thus seem appropriate to argue that Toy Story off ers a lesson in ‘how a subject is to appreciate the value of objects’, 6 and this extends right through the ‘toyetic’ 7 culture of the fi lm, which supports the sale of goods. Another way of looking, however, is to see the fi lm as playing with the idea of ownership and control. Toy Story arguably opens up other possibilities, which reshape, if not dis- turb, market terms. Indeed, the argument previously put forward by Barthes that modern toys only allow the child to ‘identify himself [sic] as owner, as 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 114242 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:34:49:34 PPMM 1 43 Fear, Guilt and the Future of Play in Toy Story 143 user, never as creator’8 becomes complicated within the memorial frame of Toy Story , and the investment it makes within the retro toy. Andy’s toys (especially Woody, who is a family heirloom) have had a long life. Within the fi lm and its sequels there are also numerous references to garage sales, donations to day care and online sales sites, such as eBay, which point toward the reuse of objects made redundant by the endless fl ow of commodity production, and to the new market economies of recycling and reuse. On the surface, Toy Story appears to involve a longing for a return to a halcyon time of childhood play. Th roughout all three fi lms, Andy clings to his toys, which eff ectively form archetypes of a past era of play. Th e attachment intensifi es as the boy advances towards ado- lescence, and, with this, we become aware of the adult market for nostalgia, which the fi lm feeds but also seeks to problematize. We can understand Toy Story as that which provides an insight into the particular fi lters of memorial- ization, which constitute a contemporary fascination with analogue materiali- ties within the digital age. As I argue, we can view the renewed attachment to the modern playthings represented within Toy Story as that which points more toward a delicate negotiation of past modalities of consumption and its norma- tive investments within the toy. Th e very fact that the narrative of Toy Story centres upon a story of the toy cowboy facing redundancy suggests a complicated return to the modern setting of play. It suggests that much more is at stake within the fi lm than simply sus- taining the toy industry, and that the story of the cowboy provides an important access point for understanding contemporary preoccupations and concerns relating to recent history. In his book Fractured Times , 9 Eric Hobsbawm observes the essentially ‘macho’ mythology that is persistently invested within the fi gure of the cowboy throughout the course of the twentieth century. Th is mythology translates through the rise of monopoly capitalism, which allows for more feminine evolutions, including the arrival of a yodelling cowgirl in the form of Jesse in Toy Story 2 (Lasseter, 1999) and the reconfi guration of the heroic adventurer in the form of the space- ranger. As is widely acknowledged, even within contexts of popular fi lm production, however, the fi gure of the cowboy now represents a controversial history of hero representation. From the outset of the fi rst fi lm, it is apparent that the cowboy – especially the toy cowboy – represents a spectre of venture capitalism that has come under strain. Th e limp and lifeless fi gure of Woody, whose speech, rather tellingly, can only be activated by the child, stands to undermine any sense of masculine authority that is usually associated with the cowboy. Here, we are witness to the elaborate cardboard construction of the Wild West within which the child uses his toys to construct a scene of battle between the ‘baddy’ One- Eyed Bart (performed by Mr. Potato Head) and the ‘goody’ Sheriff (embodied by Woody) as he saves the day.