more profound than gotterdammerung

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2010)

Some films just come at you from nowhere & completely subvert your expectations. I'd seen TS1 - I can't remember when, probably around a recent Christmas - & been unexpectedly entertained & amused, so when I sat down to eat my tea last night & found yet more golf on the News Channel & the usual carp elsewhere, I idly flicked to BBC1 & happened upon TS2. My digit hovered over the remote, but, well there was nothing else on & it would be instructive to see how much worse it was than TS1, so, half-heartedly, I continued watching. I rapidly became engaged, I'd missed a fair chunk of the film, but it wasn't difficult to work out the plot. And the toys' characters drew me in. The first rule of any narrative is that you have to care about the characters. That's why I gave up watching Mad Men; ultimately the protagonists were so devoid of any humanity I didn't care whether they lived or died, so something of a paradox that a bunch of toys should have more more emotional depth. Then, with superb timing, they introduced an intriguing moral dilemma for Woody, an actually intractable dilemma which was only partly resolved at the end of the film - rightly so, because it is genuinely intractable, & has to do with the physical nature of our being. Then the cowgirl sang a song. It was a small song about the nature of a child's love for a toy. Except the toy is a surrogate for that forgotten part of us, the spontaneous, loving part of us that we can only know as a child. And thus our relationship with our parents, the World, &, if you like, God.
She sang & I wept.
Ridiculous, I know. The prospect of a sixty rear old man crying over a children's film, but there you go. It's certainly not something that any amount of Wagner, with its overblown, egomaniacal combatants has ever been able to do. Finzi's Dies Natalis has come close though. There you have it then. A beautifully constructed, fast-paced, funny, clever, good-hearted film - even the villains are given some sympathy for their all too human (sic) failings - carrying an unpretentious depth of moral message. Brilliant.