Adam Cadre ([info]adamcadre) wrote,
@ 2009-07-01 00:00:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend  Next Entry
http://adamcadre.ac
Calendar page updated.
01 July: Toy Story; Toy Story 2

(20 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]miconazole
2009-07-02 07:26 am UTC (link)
As an only child, I identify deeply with the image of you playing board games alone.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]ballykissinger
2009-07-02 07:38 am UTC (link)
oh for reals. my stuffed animals and I had many a scintillating game of monopoly.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]miconazole
2009-07-02 05:50 pm UTC (link)
I'm pretty sure I played more games of Clue against myself than with other people.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]juan_during
2009-07-02 11:32 am UTC (link)
"...why can't Andy be just as invested in, say, a piece of cardboard with a picture of Buzz Lightyear glued to it? Why spend... holy crap, $54.99!"

What's the difference between buying expensive toys for your kids, and buying movies, or music, or videogames? Is there a difference? You can, after all, tell stories, sing songs, and play parlor games for free.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]shihtzu
2009-07-02 07:00 pm UTC (link)
Those sound just like expensive toys by another name. Though I'd argue that if you're invested in the media you expose your child to and try to focus on film, music, and games that enrich her life and make both her and you better people for the experience, these expensive toys can be a worthwhile supplement to the rocks and sticks and pads of paper. I don't have kids, though, and I can imagine a well-intentioned parent driven to existential despair when her daughter rejects something relatively wholesome and instead screams for Bratz Babiez merchandise.

On the other hand, my cynicism can't entirely overcome my optimistic hunch that kids' imaginations emerge no better or worse for the wear from playing with expensive gadgets and watching insipid movies than if they grow up on handmade toys conspicuously lacking tie-in cartoons. I admit that Final Fantasy IV (then II) had a cliched, inept narrative, but at the time I found it fresh and riveting. My imagination overrode any faults and filled in all kinds of wondrous details, concocting histories for minor characters and locations and filling the thinly sketched characters with real personality. I think puberty does a better job of killing kids' sense of wonder than even the best efforts of Madison Avenue.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]adamcadre
2009-07-02 07:11 pm UTC (link)
On the other hand, puberty greatly enhances kids' sense of wonder in the sense of "I wonder what's under that dress?"

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]adamcadre
2009-07-02 07:10 pm UTC (link)
True, and in fact this is a (pretty minor) thread in the Photopia book: Alley's parents are kind of hippieish and Wendy's are totally suburban, so when Alley goes over there she is a little thrown that the Mackayes expect her to sit Wendy down in front of a string of videos instead of telling her stories. And yes, I'd much rather have a kid be interested in playing a musical instrument than collecting Hannah Montana records, and all the board games I had paled in comparison to the ones I cooked up on sheets of posterboard.

That said, I think there is a difference to the extent that movies, music, and video games are works of art meant to be appreciated as such — and whose merits therefore depend on how they succeed or fail as works of art — while a toy like Buzz Lightyear is meant to be an avatar of a fictional character, and the point of the Polly story is that a cheap, crude avatar can be just as successful as an expensive one with blinky whirly bits. (Not only that, but it is only marketing that makes a kid want Buzz Lightyear in particular rather than Generic Spaceman Toy.)

An interesting marginal case is that of Elizabeth's ludicrously expensive Korean dolls. Here I think the expense is justified in that these dolls are themselves artworks and meant to be appreciated the way you'd appreciate a fine sculpture... it's just that these are fine sculptures you can dress up. How different is this from Barbie, though? I guess I'd say that the difference is that Barbie is a crappy sculpure with a marketing campaign attached, but now we're talking about differences of degree rather than of kind.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]sylvanus_urban
2009-07-02 09:54 pm UTC (link)
Also you could make an argument that the Korean dolls are something akin to nonabstract Lego -- not only is a Half Elf infinitely more aesthetically pleasing than a Barbie, it's also much less static. I'm sure I wouldn't find BJDs so interesting if you couldn't transform them by swapping out their eyes and hair, repainting their faces, and so on. (On the other hand, unless you craft the eyes and hair yourself, you're investing in more ludicrously expensive gewgaws to gussy up an already ludicrously expensive doll.)

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]sylvanus_urban
2009-07-10 03:57 am UTC (link)
(also, Barbie has only like 4 points of articulation, which is just sad)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]steve_dash_o
2009-07-02 02:50 pm UTC (link)
Wow, you took those films really, really literally. They've always been about human relationships to me with the "toy" stuff being cute window dressing.

Regardless, if we do focus on the toy aspect, I think one of the points of the first film is exactly what you are arguing for... Woody and the old toys *are* just as good as toys as Buzz. Buzz might be flashy, but that doesn't make him better.

It would be difficult for the movie to turn, say, wooden blocks into characters without having them sprout legs and faces when Andy leaves the room, but that doesn't mean that Pixar thinks blocks aren't also great toys. In fact, I am pretty sure they included "alphabet blocks" more than once.

Just because the characters happen to be toys like those that most Americans play with as kids doesn't mean that "children need storebought plastic props in order to play". The family gets around in a car. Does that make the movie a paean to the idea that humans need internal combustion engines to move from place to place?

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]adamcadre
2009-07-02 07:15 pm UTC (link)
Well, the movie is called Toy Story. It's about how awesome these storebought toys are. I might well be complaining about the worship of the internal combustion engine instead if I'd seen, y'know, Cars.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

(Anonymous)
2009-07-02 11:03 pm UTC (link)
Bravo. /golfclap

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]arctangent
2009-07-03 01:08 am UTC (link)
It would be a far more valid complaint for Cars than Toy Story, I have to say (having seen both not that long ago). Cars was far less subversive toward NASCAR racing than Toy Story was to Malibu-Barbie-style toy hoarding (even if you think Toy Story is too friendly to the concept of buying toys at a store at all). And the development of Cars was far, far more driven by product placement and marketing on the part of car companies than Toy Story seemed to be by toy companies.

I will add as another point that if you see Toy Story 2, Al of Al's Toy Barn, the only character in the story who is actually engaged in the business of selling toys, is portrayed as a miserable, despicable, loathsome human being.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]arctangent
2009-07-03 01:01 am UTC (link)
Does Toy Story actually celebrate the consumerist culture of the American toy market?

It isn't actively *hostile* to it but I find the claim that it celebrates it to be very doubtful. If anything it's trying to gently satirize it without, y'know, making the actual kids who actually like their actual toys burst into tears in the theater (or send off all the product-placement sponsors in a screaming huff).

I mean, the whole point of the movie is that Woody is *wrong* when he says Buzz is a "cooler" toy than he is -- Buzz is a far more "valuable" toy in terms of his price tag but Andy mainly prefers Buzz because of the novelty factor and in the end decides he likes Woody and Buzz equally. The idea that Buzz is a particularly "valuable" or "cool" toy gets mercilessly savaged with Toy Story 2 and staring at the rows and rows and rows of identical mass-produced Buzz toys -- and then the "lame" pullstring doll Woody turns out to be an OMFG PRICELESS ANTIQUE WORTH THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. And then *that* form of "value" (the form created by tweedy bespectacled cultural historians/collectors) ends up being just as irrelevant to the *real* value of Woody as a toy as Buzz's value (the one cooked up by marketing flacks).

I guess Toy Story couldn't be a WALL-E-esque assault on consumerism based on where Pixar was positioned at the time -- having to kowtow to Disney, broaden their audience as wide as possible, play nice with product placement -- but it's far from a "paean" to consumerism. Toy Story 2 treats the whole basic premise that underlies the mindless purchasing of more toys -- that an "old" toy becomes "obsolete" and must be "upgraded" to a "modern" toy -- as a tragic farce. (Farce in the case of New Buzz Lightyear with his utility belt and total lack of personality being clearly inferior to Old Buzz Lightyear -- outright tragedy in the nightmarish sequence of Woody imagining being carelessly thrown away.)

And there's countless little subversions along the way, too. My favorite is Buzz Lightyear reciting his stirring backstory speech (copied from the back of the box) and the other toys replying, "Cool. I'm from Hasbro." "And I'm from Mattel. Well, actually I'm not technically from Mattel, I'm from a smaller local company that was absorbed by Mattel and the trademark reverted to..." Rex goes on an interminably long explanation that's a very familiar story to those of us who've had any contact with the sordid world of toy collecting, and a bit of the seamy underside of the rather ugly and nasty industry that spins these stupid hokey stories about toys-as-avatars-of-dreams is revealed to the audience in the guise of a joke. Etc.

Seriously, I thought the main subversive thing in the first place was how intentionally stupid, bad and obviously a short-term fad the "Buzz Lightyear of Star Command" thing was, including the fact that Buzz does in fact look kind of dumb rather than actually looking cool (they're freely mixing memes that don't really go together, with his costume and the name "Buzz" invoking the aw-shucks-good-ol'-boy vintage astronaut character but mixing all that up awkwardly with a Star-Wars-inspired epic-heroism shtick) and that even in his "real" toy pose Buzz looks like an arrogant deluded dick you'd like to smack (his grin is smarmy rather than courageous and heroic, and he's got a squat, tubby body that's actually shorter than Woody's).

I thought this, anyway, and then some weird wires-crossed form of irony occurred in some marketing department and they *actually made* a Buzz Lightyear of Star Command Saturday morning cartoon, a fact that continues to confuse and dismay me to this day.

(Reply to this)


(Anonymous)
2009-07-06 05:47 pm UTC (link)
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Toy+Stories+for+Humanists%3F-a060100167

Toy Story as Atheist Parable

(Reply to this)


[info]ghira
2009-07-06 06:22 pm UTC (link)
Germaine Greer reviewed the first Toy Story positively on TV, but observed that the only
kid who displayed real creativity with his toys was portrayed as the baddie.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]arctangent
2009-07-07 06:03 am UTC (link)
I don't like the idea that Sid is more creative than Andy simply because he takes his toys apart and puts them back together. Andy creates whole detailed stories and characters for his toys, often wildly divergent from the characters and stories the toys are "supposed" to represent. Sid cuts up toys and puts them back together because... he enjoys defacing and mutilating things and making them look scary and weird. He "tortures" his toys because he enjoys imagining them being tortured. He destroys his toys because he enjoys the feeling of destroying something.

It takes no particular creativity to have that mindset and it makes me uncomfortable to see it being celebrated.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]sylvanus_urban
2009-07-10 04:01 am UTC (link)
Best case scenario: Sid grew up to be this lady.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]arctangent
2009-07-13 04:50 am UTC (link)
The problem is I've met a lot more adults who enjoy melting, burning or smashing things for the sake of destroying them than I do adults who actively deconstruct and reconstruct things for the sake of making art.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]arctangent
2009-07-13 04:51 am UTC (link)
(Is it even true that Sid actually created most of the "mutant" toys? We know he transplants the doll's head and the pterodactyl's, but that's something of a simplistic operation. Building the mechanical spider body for the baby-headed mutant leader seems like it'd require more patience than he actually possesses, and we know that the mutants themselves have just as much if not more skill at "fixing" toys as Sid himself, and there must be a reason those toys spend most of their time hidden... I always thought that most of the mutants were implied to have reconstructed themselves/been reconstructed by other mutants out of the salvaged parts left over when Sid blows something up.)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(20 comments) - (Post a new comment)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…