The reason I wouldn't have done it is now clear to me. It required moving everything out of my wife's office space, our bedroom and my younger son's bedroom, and down into the basement. It almost felt like we were moving house, that's how big of a production it was. This area also contains bookshelves with more than 500 books, so we went up and down the stairs with armloads of those as well. (The timing was that we were getting a new bed, finally replacing the one we've used ever since we moved here in 2013.)
But it wasn't just for logistical reasons I was wary about the task. It was for sentimental ones.
A child's bedroom, undisturbed for four-and-a-half years since we moved here, is like a museum to the history of all his former taste in toys. It shows everything he acquired from the ages of 8 to 12, plus quite a lot of stuff he had before that. They're either still actually on display, or squirreled away in cabinets and drawers that are easily accessible at a moment's notice.
A child's bedroom disturbed by a carpet cleaning? Well, it forces that child to choose what's returning to that bedroom and what's going into storage (scary!) or being given away (even more scary!).
And my wife had my son make these decisions this week.
I'm glad to say that he takes after his old man in terms of sentimentality. When separating the wheat from the chaff, the chaff pile included clearly random bits of plastic detritus that had basically no attachment for him. (Or for me, I should note.) The stuff he kept was the stuff I would have kept, which is to say, most of it.
That's a win. But it doesn't mean my son is actually playing with any of this stuff, not halfway through his 12th year. Nor should he be. I might have still been playing with toys, only just, at age 12, but it surely would have been nearing the end, and that was back in the 1980s.
Today, screens take care of toys a lot earlier than that, and a few days later that that, Saturday, was a reminder of that. Not of toys vs. screens, but of the dominance of screens in general.
My wife and I went to an afternoon BBQ to celebrate the winter solstice here in Australia. It's held annually at a vineyard about 90 minutes from here that's in the family of one of my wife's friends. Naturally they have a lovely selection of wine, though my wife's friend's brother also distills whiskey so there was that too. On the food side, they roast a whole goat on the spit -- actually two of them, back to back. It's scrumptious.
We used to take our kids to this, but none of the other friends' kids come anymore, so this year we didn't. When we got back, it was clear that my younger son had just been on screens all day, and why wouldn't he have been? At least then I transitioned him to watching a movie. We watched Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2.
You might be wondering where I'm going with this long preamble, except you've seen the poster I've attached to this post, not to mention the title I've chosen, so you've figured it out.
Basically I wanted to set the scene for how resonant the themes of Toy Story 5 are with me, particularly at this moment generally, particularly this week specifically. And yet I still thought it was pretty boring and an increasingly redundant entry into this series that has now been going on for 31 years.
What I said in my Toy Story 5 review, which will post on Monday so check back, was that the reason, beyond financial incentives, for doing a Toy Story 5 was that devices had not yet played their logical role of antagonist to the toys in a Toy Story movie. I thought Toy Story 4 in 2019 might have been a better time to do that, making this one feel late to the party, but obviously, given my firsthand experience with screen use in my own family, I felt it was a topic worth exploring.
And so I thought it was strange to watch Toy Story 5 and feel mild annoyance at how obvious the choices were and how much everything felt like a rehash from something earlier in the series. Here's another line from my review: "Is it really possible that 31 years later, the most compelling material they can come up with for a new Toy Story movie is the toys worrying, once again, about their kids ditching them?"
The film shifts to Jessie as the protagonist -- a welcome move away from Woody and Buzz, who really do feel shoehorned in -- but in a way that just makes this issue more acute. Toy Story 2, 27 years ago, was already Jessie's big reckoning with her abandonment issues over Emily leaving her at the side of the road in a donation box. This movie goes back into the same territory and even revisits material from that movie. It's kind of how I felt when I watched Creed 2, which still devoted a significant portion of its thematic heft to reckoning over the death of Apollo Creed. I was like "Didn't we already do this in the first one?"
I don't want to rehash all my points from the review. You'll have a chance to read it soon, possibly even now depending on when you're reading this. But I'll just say that I also have positive things to say about Toy Story 5 and that I've given it the marginally positive three-star rating. There's material involving a lost shipping container of Buzz Lightyear toys that I thought was pretty exciting and inventive.
But it's a problem that I was clearly primed for a movie about toys being sunsetted by technology -- so primed that I've written more than 600 words about it before I even started discussing the movie -- and yet I still found it a bit tedious. It's still an easy call to describe the Toy Story franchise as Pixar's best, especially since there's only one other that even has more than two movies. But they chipped away at the overall effectiveness of the franchise with Toy Story 4, and they've done even more of that here.
And when I did get to the theater to see it, part of a 1-2 Pixar punch with Hoppers within 24 hours across Thursday and Friday, it was not with my younger son.
Too bad, maybe he could have benefitted from its conclusions.
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