Toy Story Lets Its Characters Grow Up
5 min read
According to the director, the movie series endures because it embraces time.
Toy Story 5 arrives in theaters this week, the fifth chapter in a story that began 30 years ago. Asked in a recent Wall Street Journal interview what had most surprised him about the franchise, the director, Andrew Stanton, said the series endures because its makers were willing to let the characters grow up. Andy outgrows his toys and gives them to a little girl Bonnie Anderson. Woody retires his sheriff badge, pinning it on Jessie to make her the toys' new leader. The lesson was to “learn to embrace time” rather than freeze the characters in amber.
Most entertainment does the opposite. The Simpsons has been on the air since 1989. Bart is still ten years old. Lisa is still eight. After more than three decades, the family has not aged a day. That is a legitimate artistic choice, and it has made people laugh for a generation. But it is also a portrait of life with the clock switched off, where nothing is ever lost and nothing is ever gained, because nothing is ever allowed to move forward.
The question Toy Story provokes is: which of those two stories are you living? Are you embracing time, letting each stage of life arrive and do its work? Or are you trying to freeze yourself, forever reaching back toward a younger version of yourself that is not coming back?
My late uncle once said to my late father in jest, “After 50, life becomes easier. because it’s downhill.” Judaism perspective is to embrace every period of life with its own unique characteristics. In the fifth chapter of Ethics of the Fathers, Rabbi Yehuda ben Teima maps the human life decade by decade. Thirty is the age of strength. Forty is the age of understanding. Fifty is the age for giving counsel. Sixty is the age of the elder. Seventy is the age of fullness. Eighty, remarkably, is the age of special strength.
The work of growing older is to keep showing up for the season you are actually in.
The list does not describe a peak followed by a long decline, the “downhill of life.” It describes an unending climb, with each decade contributing its own gift. The strength of thirty is not the strength of eighty, and the Mishnah does not pretend otherwise; but it insists that eighty has a strength of its own, one that thirty cannot yet possess. The person who can give counsel at fifty could not have given it at twenty, because he had not yet lived enough to earn it.
Each season offers a different experience and mission. The work of growing older is to keep showing up for the season you are actually in.
There is a strange feature of how we experience time. When you are young, a year feels enormous. To a seven-year-old, a single year is one-seventh of everything he has ever known. The summer stretches on without end. The reason is as much mathematical as emotional. We measure each stretch of time against the small amount of life we have lived so far, and against that small denominator, every day looms large.
Then something shifts. Somewhere in your thirties and forties the years begin to blur and accelerate. The denominator keeps growing, so each new year is a smaller and smaller fraction of the life behind us, and time seems to pick up speed.
Later in life, the denominator flips. You stop measuring time against the years you have already lived and start measuring it against the vibrant and healthy years you sense you have left. A year to a fifty-year-old is a thin slice of the life behind him, barely two percent. Measured against whatever remains in front of him, it is something else entirely. And so time becomes precious again, the way it was in childhood.
The child treasured time out of innocence. The older person treasures it out of awareness.
The child treasured time out of innocence. The older person treasures it out of awareness. The denominator has flipped, and the worth of every day has risen with it.
Embracing time means letting go of the stage you've left and asking what the current one is for. It’s to let the handoffs happen, the way Andy handed his toys to a younger child, the way parents hand the world to their children, without treating the handoff as a defeat. It’s to number your days the way an investor counts capital, because what is scarce is what we treat as precious.
Every season arrives wearing its own crown, and the quiet blessing of growing older is that you get to wear each one in turn. Number your days and you find that they were never running out. They were filling up.
