Even though Toy Story is rich ground for analysis and introspection, it can also be taken for what it is: a "buddy" movie between two characters, Woody and Buzz, who start off as anything but friends.

The core conflict of Toy Story is deliberately similar to so many buddy comedies: whether two opposing figures can become friends, or at least learn not to sabotage each other whenever the opportunity presents itself. On a surface level, however, the struggle isn’t about Buzz and Woody’s rivalry-turned-friendship. It’s about whether a little boy will choose to play with a cowboy or an astronaut, which wasn’t a key debate among most children of the nineties. “Two words: Sput-nik!” is the acrid explanation offered to Woody in Toy Story 2 when he wonders why his popular Howdy Doody-style TV show, Woody’s Roundup, was canceled in the mid-1950s. That sentiment applies equally to the clash here. The good-hearted sheriff battling an intergalactic party-crasher has its roots in the pop culture of John Lasseter’s childhood, not that of generation X or generation Y. The same is true of the other toys in Andy’s bedroom, culture clash aside: Mr. Potato Head, a Barrel of Monkeys, an Etch-a-Sketch, a nondescript dinosaur, and so on. For a modern kid, Andy Davis thankfully appears to be unaware of the existence of video games, and blissfully content to play with whatever hand-me-downs he can find.

Sheriff Woody is on top of the world, or at least at the top of the food chain in Andy’s bedroom, as Toy Story begins, yet he remains secretly fearful about the prospects of the boy’s sixth birthday party. He dreads that it’ll be accompanied by something, anything, that could up-end his prior state of subtly power-driven nirvana. His barely contained neuroses aren’t unfounded, as he’s soon replaced as the leader of Andy’s room after that party by Buzz Lightyear, a spaceman toy with bells, whistles, and all sorts of gadgets that impress the child’s less easily worried, less cutting-edge playthings. This isn’t to suggest that Andy’s other toys don’t display a range of emotions; however, their personalities, whether it’s Rex’s perpetually frayed nerves or Mr. Potato Head’s blustery swagger, aren’t informed by being atop a power structure. Much as Christopher Robin’s playthings in the Hundred-Acre Wood represent different facets of a child’s personality, so, too, do the toys in Andy’s bedroom—all the way down to the mischievous squeaking shark in his toy chest.

Buzz is certainly flashier and cooler than Woody—a TV commercial shown at a key moment communicates both the intense, rapidly paced, and pushy tone of modern toy ads as well as the notion that a Buzz Lightyear toy is a ticket for a little boy or girl to become instantly accepted by their peer group. But Lasseter’s inspiration for Buzz, even in the early phases of production and development, were space toys like Major Matt Mason, a relic of the sixties. Although Andy’s transition from handmade, pull-string dolls to those with computer-designed gadgets was common for anyone growing up at the end of the twentieth century, the dilemma of whether to favor one straight out of the Old West or one from the outer reaches of the galaxy has its roots in the retro-futuristic style of 1950s and ’60s popular culture.

Andy’s bedroom (and thus, his childhood) is out of time. It’s a holdover from the era before computers had a vice grip on children, a time when they played instead with toys and games they could hold in their hands, touch and squeeze and throw, and bounce off walls. Toy Story opens with Andy’s latest fantasy, where the stoic sheriff in the middle of a dusty western town faces off against a fearsome outlaw and his posse. Once the toys are shaken out of the boy’s goofy reverie, we find that Woody is not quite as pure of spirit as Gary Cooper in High Noon. More so, what could easily be a straightforward western pastiche becomes absurdist instantaneously via childish constructs. Andy lets his mind spin away from the basics of the genre and turns his playtime into something grander and more outlandish, much as the filmmakers themselves do with the buddy comedy subgenre.

By the end of the film, the good guy wins the day and the girl, and Woody and Buzz turn out to be the best of friends, but the ways in which these conclusions occur are wholly different from the safe choices of years past. Though he’s a more complex character than Cooper’s taciturn Will Kane, Woody does wind up on his own within about a half hour of the opening scene, as the rest of his old friends forsake him for the fancy new toy who can “fly” and shoot a red blinking light from his forearm. Buzz Lightyear heralds a new beginning for Woody and the other toys, just as Toy Story represented a sea change in the world of feature animation, and in all of cinema, twenty years ago. Woody is the sole holdout, unwilling to accept the forces of change even as his counterparts give themselves over to the unlimited possibilities of whatever mysteries exist in the future.

Continued in "Pixar and the Infinite Past"!

One of the things you never see in an animated Disney or Pixar film is blood. The characters are assumed to have pixie dust in their veins. So when blood is shown, in Up it's a shock to the system, and a reminder that dark things do dwell in nostalgic places.

When villains in Disney films die, they do so out of eyeshot as frequently as possible. The only time Pixar has depicted a villain’s demise onscreen is at the end of its most violent film, The Incredibles, when the bitter Syndrome is sucked up by a jet engine, which subsequently explodes. But even Up falls back on one of the most familiar Disney death tropes, when Charles Muntz falls off his zeppelin, thousands of feet to the ground, much as Gaston falls from a castle spire in Beauty and the Beast or the poacher McLeach tumbles from a waterfall in The Rescuers Down Under. As soon as he falls through the clouds below the zeppelin, it’s as if Muntz never existed at all.

But it’s Carl’s attack on a well-meaning person, an innocent bystander who accidentally knocks a mailbox off its axis, that grounds Up. Carl only draws a slight amount of blood, nothing more than a bop on the head, but the consequence of his action is so startling that it balances out the fantastical elements to follow. Even as he embarks on an adventure with flying houses, never-before-seen birds, and talking dogs, Carl’s tragic loss and his moment of primal fury hover above him throughout. Few moments in Pixar films remain more shocking than this bit of violence, coupled with the subsequent gasps and pointing from passersby and the reaction shot of a sweaty and desperate Carl.

The event is all the more impressive because of how successful Pete Docter, co-writer Bob Peterson, and the rest of the filmmaking team are at imbuing inanimate objects like a mailbox with a backstory. Carl’s attack, and subsequent court case, occur within the first fifteen minutes, by which time we’ve already met and lost Ellie, who leaves behind scrapbooks, pictures, and, here, a handprint on an old mailbox. To anyone else, Carl’s attack is irrational—a sign of senility and possibly dementia. To us, after a few brief moments, it’s a serious and painful violation of a man’s life.

Carl’s response to potentially being forced out of his home and into an assisted-living facility is, of course, inherently ridiculous. Anyone able to lift up a house with balloons (and only balloons) defies logic, especially when the anyone in question is an elderly man who requires automated help traversing a flight of stairs. What constantly tethers this outlandish setup to the ground is Carl’s struggle with the past. The montage in the first act, scored to Michael Giacchino’s sweet and intentionally repetitive track “Married Life,” has been praised by countless critics as one of the very best, if not the best, sequences in Pixar’s history. Lisa Schwarzbaum noted that it’s “as deeply textured as any great novel”; Sheila O’Malley accurately pointed out that the montage “is a masterpiece of how little you have to do to hook your audience in for the long haul”; and Roger Ebert said the sequence “deals with the life experience in a way that is almost never found in family animation.” The placement of this sequence in the first act is necessary, because Carl no longer has the luxury of his comfortable life with Ellie. All he has are fractions of memories, mental montages he cannot stop playing in his mind.

Continued in "Pixar and the Infinite Past"!