Toy Story 3 and the case for toys

New York Times movie critic, A.O. Scott, makes the case for toys and licensing (and capitalism and materialism too) in his review of the new Toy Story 3 movie: "Voyage to the Bottom of the Day Care Center." Yes, the article is about the movie but if you do a close reading you see that he has much to say on the relevance of manufactured toys and entertainment as a means of developing imagination, intellect and, yes, love. 

As he puts it: "Perhaps no series of movies has so brilliantly grasped the emotional logic that binds the innate creativity of children at play to the machinery of mass entertainment." 

Scott sees brilliance in this movie series turning the table by making the story about the toy we play with rather than about we who play with the toy. As he puts it: "Therein lie its genius, and its uncanny authenticity. A tale that captured the romance and pathos of the consumer economy, the sorrows and pleasures that dwell at the heart of our materialist way of life, could only be told from the standpoint of the commodities themselves, those accretions of synthetic substance and alienated labor we somehow endow with souls."

In a time when we find our industry's products sometimes deemed in competition with gadgets, Scott steps out and makes a special place for toys. "Cars, appliances, laptops, iPads: we love them... [but] It's purest, most innocent expression -[and] also its most vulnerable and perishable - is the attachment formed between children and the toys we buy them. "I want that!" "That's mine!" Slogans of acquisitive selfishness, to be sure, but also articulations of desire and loyalty." 

Scott summarizes by acknowledging that although you can't buy love, maybe you can for a child with a toy. As he puts it: "This whole three-part, 15-year epic - about the adventures of a bunch of silly plastic junk turns out also to be a long, melancholy meditation on loss, impermanence and that noble,stubborn, foolish thing called love.  

We all know money can't buy it, except sometimes, for the price of a plastic figurine or a movie ticket."

About as honest and objective a take on toys as I have seen.   Thank you Mr. Scott and thank you Pixar.