Yesterday, I saw a 6:15 showing of Toy Story 3 in Maryland then rushed into DC to see a 9:30 screening of the infamous cult phenom The Room, with a special Q&A with director, writer, star, and trainwreck Tommy Wisseau. These films share almost no common ground and had I not seen them in succession, I would never discuss them together. But the fact that they’re both movies and they both attempt (one with more success than the other) to touch upon universal human emotions, gives me a platform to compare my experiences, albeit a poorly built platform with no stable foundation.
The failure of The Room, and its subsequent success as a product of that failure, is evidence of the difficulty of tapping actual human emotion. The Room tries to (read: fails at) portraying loss, betrayal, and grief using real actors with a story that, ignorning all major plot holes, could happen (in some bizarre episode of Maury). Toy Story 3 tries to (read: succeeds marvelously at) portraying a similar set of human emotions: loss (loss of innocence), betrayal (the toy’s perceived betrayal by their owners), and grief (inherent to the loss that goes along with growth and change). The difference (one among many glowing differences) is that Toy Story’s actors are not only inanimate objects, but they are computer generated inanimate objects. Bottom line, I never cease to be amazed at how good Pixar is at making me cry.
