I don’t know if I’ve ever related to Taylor Swift more than when she asked Tom Hanks to sign her “Toy Story” VHS tape at the June 9 premiere of “Toy Story 5.”
I was 4 when the original “Toy Story” movie was released in 1995, and it was one of the first VHS tapes I remember owning. The plastic case became worn in one corner from being opened and closed and opened and closed, and like Swift, I hung onto it even as movie-watching moved to DVDs and then streaming. For me, the tattered case of the VHS tape was a symbol of the kid I used to be and a reminder of Randy Newman’s iconic lyrics, “You’ve got a friend in me.”
In today’s franchise-heavy media landscape in which I often bemoan unnecessary prequels and sequels and remakes, “Toy Story” feels like a rarity because of the genuine way it has served as a friend, acting as a touchstone for millennials like me who’ve grown up alongside Andy, Woody, Buzz, Jessie and Bonnie. Within this context, “Toy Story 5,” a movie that examines the influence of screens on childhood, is the natural continuation of that evolution.
The first movie begins with Andy playing with his favorite toy, a cowboy named Woody, on the day of his birthday party. When Andy runs downstairs for his party, leaving Woody unattended, he sits up, says “the coast is clear,” and suddenly, the room is in motion with toys driving and walking and talking.
As a kid, I remember loving this moment and the idea that the toys in my own room — my Polly Pockets and Madeline doll and Beanie Babies — were also sentient and had a life of their own when I went to school or outside to play in the backyard. There’s a general idea that younger children read to understand the world around them, and I think this same logic applies to the way younger children view movies. I was around Andy’s age, but I was less interested in him than I was in the world that existed inside of his room when he exited the scene.
The life within his room changed the way I saw the world around me, infusing it with creativity and magic. The first “Toy Story” became a portal to a new way of looking at objects; they had more possibilities than what I saw on the surface and everything contained its own story. As a kid who loved to write and was beginning to make up her own stories for the first time, this lens was transformational.
I was also drawn to the complexity within that world after Woody becomes jealous when Andy is gifted a Buzz Lightyear toy and the dynamics of the room change. This toy-focused way of watching the movies was the same for me in “Toy Story 2” because I was 8 when the sequel was released. At the beginning of the film, Andy plays with Woody a little too hard and tears off one of his arms. Woody is “damaged,” and he is afraid that Andy doesn’t want to play with him anymore.
Eventually, that becomes true in “Toy Story 3,” which premiered the summer before I left for college. In the movie, Andy is also leaving for college, and he must decide what to do with everything in his room, including his old toys: trash, donate, attic or pack.
Suddenly, I wasn’t a little kid focused on how the movie helped me understand the world around me but a teen seeing how it helped me understand myself. Watching Andy struggle with the transition from kid to adult and what it means to literally put childish things away resonated deeply with me because I was making that same transition. I vividly remember sitting in the theater next to my best friend and crying as Andy gave his toys to Bonnie and played with them for one final time, because my childhood, like Andy’s, was ending, and I felt Andy’s pain at saying goodbye, so he could keep growing up.
By the time “Toy Story 4” came out in 2019, I was officially a grown-up. My daughter was 1, and I was pregnant with my son. She was too young to go see the movie with me in the theater, but I went, and it was the first time I saw myself as one of the parents in the story: Bonnie’s mom. When Woody leaves the gang of toys at the end of the movie to set out on a life of his own with Bo Peep, it seemed to cement the end of the transition that I’d started when “Toy Story 3” was released.
But it’s not that simple. I was talking to another mom last weekend who was excited to take her son to “Toy Story 5” because it was going to be his first movie in the theater, and she’d also grown up alongside the franchise.
“I’m Andy’s mom now,” she said to me, laughing. Her husband interrupted to disagree, saying, “No, we’re Andy.”
The truth is that we’re both. Storytelling for children always strives to achieve this dual perspective, to tell a story in which both kids and their parents can see themselves. What’s rare is that the parent audience of “Toy Story” has existed as both, and it creates a special duality in which we can see every version of ourselves that we’ve been while growing up with the movies.
And now we can watch our children begin to do the same.
I never expected that “Toy Story” would be around long enough for me to take my kids to see one of the movies in the theater, but that’s what we did last Thursday. The movie begins with the precept that “the age of toys is over.” Bonnie can’t make friends because she is the only kid around her still playing with analog toys in a digital, screen-filled world. When Jessie gets lost while trying to help Bonnie make a friend, she embarks on a journey that shows the truth of toys vs. tech is not so simple ― and neither is parenting in this new age.
The revelation is not that all tech is bad; it’s the nuanced reality that new technology can undermine the kind of real connections and friendships parents like me want for our kids, but it can also facilitate friendship in unexpected ways. I won’t spoil what happens, but I will say that my kids loved the movie, and I loved getting to watch them watch the same toys I’d grown up with tell a new story and show them the world around them in a different way, just like the first “Toy Story” did for me.
In Swift’s new single for the film, “I Knew It, I Knew You” she sings, “I knew you / through the daze of the blades of the grass in summer / parachutes for the free fall of being younger.” For people like me who have grown up with these characters, every iteration of “Toy Story” has served as a “parachute” to support the “free fall” that is growing up and finding your place in the world.
I’m grateful that this support now extends to my kids as they begin to search for theirs.
“Toy Story 5” is now playing in theaters.
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