Imagine What Toy Story 3 Could Possible Mean To Me

So tell me please, is it weird that the above Toy Story 3 trailer got me thinking?  I’m saying yes…uhh and no.

The first half of preview is achingly beautiful – you have a child (Andy) shown in pure bliss, playing with the toys that he dearly loves, crafting worlds and scenes with only his mind.  He is the embodiment of pure imagination in those first scenes, oblivious to everything but what he creates (except for the ridiculously true look of embarrassment that passes on his face right when his mom interrupts his playing – picture perfect!).

But the movie has to go somewhere, right?  Ten years since Toy Story 2, and Andy has grown up, just like the rest of us.  Going to college, only a few years younger than me – and I can tell you from experience, toys are not looked highly upon in the dorm room.  So the toys are left behind, Buzz and Woody are no longer Andy’s, and the pure joy we saw on Andy’s face has been replaced by the dull stare into a computer screen.

Wow – those guys at Pixar have a great grasp on true life.

I’d say I stopped playing with the majority of my physical toys about nine years ago.  I was thirteen.  I can actually remember the last legitimate action figure I received from my mom – Wolverine.  The X-Men movie had just come out.

Now I don’t know why I truly stopped making the imaginary worlds, all I know that when those worlds no longer materialized, I was much more hardpressed to use my imagination in general.  And what a sad thing that is.

Maybe it’s peer pressure, maybe it’s the adults, maybe it’s this society, or maybe it’s just our genetic makeup, but no one can deny that at some point in our lives, our imagination dries up and crumbles in the breeze.  Our friends make fun of our flights of fancy, adults now tell us “to get our head out of the clouds” instead of encouraging us to keep playing like they weren’t even there.  Society demands us to be serious – you know, because this life is serious and living is serious business.  But regardless of why, the vast majority of us lose our imagination (or it at least its boundlessness) and those that retain it are typically seen as eccentric or weird.  Unless, of course, you can use your imagination to tap into the imaginations of others a la JRR Tolkien, Lost, or those guys from Pixar.  Then you are a visionary, and probably something even greater – for those are the ones that permit us to break whatever weird vow we’ve made in ourselves to be so serious and allow some of the ocean of our imagination to splash back onto us, at least for a little while.  But no one can tell me they’ve never felt a pang like I do when I sit around and watch my niece sing a song that she just made or my nephew beat Superman up with his Spider-man.

It’s sad at some level, but its also lovely to know that, at some point in our oh-so-serious existence, we weren’t.

We were visionaries…at least to our toys and the worlds they lived in.

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