The Spirit of Toys: Resurrection and Redemption in Toy Story and Toy Story 2

What most children want, above all, is to see the soul of their toys, some at the end of a certain period of use, others right away. It is on the more or less swift invasion of this desire that depends the length of life of a toy. I do not find it in me to blame this infantile mania; it is a first metaphysical tendency. When this desire has implanted itself in the child's cerebral marrow, it fills his fingers and nails with an extraordinary agility and strength. This child twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes it, bumps it against the walls, throws it on the ground ... at last he opens it up, he is the stronger. But where is the soul? This is the beginning of melancholy and gloom.

Baudelaire, 'Morale du Joujou'

To infinity and beyond!

Buzz Lightyear

Toy Story and its sequel Toy Story 2 are deeply invested (thematically and financially) in the mortality of toys. In both movies toys come to life when human beings are not looking. The toys represent lives that are not only intelligent, emotional, and psychological but also at least partially biological (as in the need to breathe oxygenated air and, it seems, the desire for physical love). And there is nothing new in dolls that drink and urinate, or puppets that fight and fuck.¹ Most important, these toys come to life in a way that is metaphysical. They experience a metaphysical or even a spiritual dimension in the sense that something infinite emerges from the man-made or concrete. They dream. They have imaginations. In particular, like human beings, they can and do imagine death. Their life and death, moreover, are inseparable from the medium in which they are represented.

Death is imagined obsessively in both movies. In Toy Story, Death stalks in the form of an eight-year-old neighbour named Sid who wears a black T-shirt with a skull printed on it that disturbingly resembles his own face. Sid is a toy-sadist. 'He tortures toys for fun,' wails the Dinosaur Rex. He performs hideous 'medical' experiments, loves explosives, and has a pathologically violent temper. Sid's house is suburban gothic, a dark underworld of violence in the land of white picket fences. In his demolition area of a backyard Sid blows up action figures and wreaks havoc, bellowing with angry laughter. His ferocious pit-bull Skud is his sole companion. Inside his dark, bolted room, neglected by his parents, he dismembers dolls, dinosaurs, and erector sets. As the Disney website tells us: 'Deep within the inner sanctum of ... Sid's room, lies a collection of toys that no boy should have created. Where Andy's room is a haven for Woody [a vintage cowboy doll], Buzz [a space-ranger action figure], and all the other toys, Sid's room is no-man's-land – the work of an unwell mind' ('... mutant').

Distinctions between well and unwell, should and shouldn't, haven and no-man's land, are, of course, ideological; they reflect a particular set of interests and assumptions. The movies do not analyse these assumptions or offer alternative conceptual forms to those that shape and are shaped by middle-class American popular culture. Oppositions, such as that between Andy's room and Sid's, define each other. They occur within the same totalistic bipolar system, and any search for meaning within that system will be endless and self-enclosed. However, problems are raised or a drama of self-reflection occurs in the toys when they are displaced between social and rhetorical opposites. So, movements from Andy's room to Sid's 'no-man's land,' from the 'well' to the 'unwell' (and back again) entail an experience of liminality that is crucial to experiences that may be understood as rites of passage. 'Such rites,' Victor Turner explains, 'characteristically begin with ritual metaphors of killing or death marking the separation of the subject from ordinary secular relationships ... and conclude with a symbolic rebirth or reincorporation into society as shaped by the law and...