It ends with Bonnie using Woody's arm to wave goodbye, as Andy waves goodbye to his childhood. There's a sadness on par with the grief of death that goes along with such reflection, but there's also beauty in the fleeting nature of time and the meaning that's bestowed upon random things and moments. As the little girl reaches for what she calls her cowboy, Andy makes peace with the idea that this phase of his life has come to a close, as his mother and his toys must also do. Andy gives his box of toys to Bonnie, and gets a sweet parting moment with each one, but is hesitant with Woody. The final scene, though not quite as burned into the collective consciousness, is the one that breaks the emotional dam. In a way that's aw-shucks mixed with our deepest fears, Toy Story 3 tells us it'll all be okay, even in the end. There are rarely such soul-challenging scenes in live-action, R-rated movies. In what seems like it might be their dying moments, the toys hold hands, wordlessly express their affection and appreciation of each other and accept their fate. Upon its initial release, audiences literally gasped and couldn't believe their eyes as Woody, Buzz, Jessie and company inch ever closer to the hellfire of the junkyard incinerator. Toy Story 3 ups the ante, becoming a film that's explicitly about finding meaning in life in the face of death. It might sound overly lofty to suggest so, but the first and second films explore mature themes like finding purpose in life when things don't go as planned, recovering from grief and the fact that we tend to see ourselves as the protagonists in our life stories, even when we're wrong. But, to some extent, they've always been pretty existential, too. That the casts of the Toy Story films are made up of old toys like Etch-A-Sketches and Green Army Men automatically make them an exercise in nostalgia. Toy Story 3's central message - about life moving on and letting go - resonated on an extremely personal level with both demographics, which explains the theaters full of grown ups struggling to muffle their sobs and sniffles. Parents who had taken their kids to see the movies when they were small were about to be empty nesters. Kids who fell in love with Woody and Buzz as small children were roughly at the same stage of life as Andy when Toy Story 3 premiered they were entering adulthood. But the real happy accident of the long production process is that in those ten years, Toy Story's audience aged in lock step with the franchise.
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