On Toy Story?

With only a few weeks remaining before the release of Toy Story 5, the Toy Story franchise undoubtedly remains one of the most successful in cinematic history. Across the years, it has undergone profound transformations, ranging from technological innovation to ideological change. The franchise has grown alongside society.

Naturally, behind each of these transformations lies a question worth asking, since they shape us both as individuals and as a collective. The first Toy Story was officially released in 1995, thirty-one years ago. Three decades, for even greater impact.

When examining the development of these films closely, one element drew my attention precisely because it occupies the very core of what I research, defend, and argue for: music as a fundamental component of the cinematic product, as the element that sustains its historical continuity.

There is not a single Toy Story film whose score was not composed by Randy Newman. What does this tell us? Directors, producers, animators, and countless other creative figures may come and go, yet the music remains like a pedal point: a constant, an inseparable pulse running throughout the entire franchise.

Music articulates the different historical processes through which the franchise has evolved, configuring a harmonic fabric that, although created through music itself, transforms the act of making music into something greater than simply making art. It becomes an act of making culture, of producing positions, visibility, and politics. The distance between these dimensions is, in reality, far smaller than it may initially appear.

Toy Story belongs to the animated genre and is classified as children's cinema. Many would therefore assume that it is "for children." Yet reality is far more complex than that. At the time of its release, Toy Story spoke primarily to children of the 1990s. Today, those same audiences continue to choose the franchise, largely through nostalgia, while contemporary generations of children continue to enter its world. Within this landscape, music establishes coordinates that shape both our sense of orientation and our emotional state through the activation of the different temporalities it traverses.

If we listen carefully to Newman's instrumentation, we can distinguish a clear combination of jazz, orchestral writing, and distinctly American musical traditions such as country, folk, and western music. This choice is far from arbitrary. The history of these genres developed alongside the cultural formation of the communities from which they emerged. They arose from the need to articulate the value of rural life and to claim its rightful place within the collective narrative. This ideological constellation clearly emphasized the values and institutions associated with American society: family, home, territory, labour, and community.

The fact that these musical styles narrate an animated film preserves both their origins and the mental frameworks from which they emerged.

Now, what happens when this expands onto a global scale? The image of what is becomes transformed and resignified in favour of its origin. I want to emphasise that my intention is not to judge either this process or its creators, but rather to highlight the extraordinary power of a cultural product capable of transforming a local sonic language into a shared emotional reference on a global scale.

Suddenly, childhood, leadership, and loyalty begin to sound like jazz, with its playful and improvisatory nature; they sound like strummed and fingerpicked strings... What once defined American culture has gradually become the sonic (that is, the spatial) image of global childhood. It has become a tradition to look at Woody, hear the clarinet, and immediately think of our own childhood, our home, and our deepest emotional bonds. A tradition.

With this term, I want us to return to the point from which this reflection began: the Pixar sound as tradition.

Tradition is far from being something that can be condensed into a single word. Or perhaps it is one of those words that must be examined closely if we are to inhabit it differently. Tradition is an active cultural operation, not a neutral concept or an archival record.

Tradition serves to legitimise the present, for instance, the power and enduring success of the franchise itself. A society selectively preserves certain elements of the past because they help sustain particular relationships through which people make sense of their lives. At the same time, those relationships uphold structures of power that orchestrate the dynamics through which we exist collectively.

In this particular case, because music is the only element that has remained throughout the franchise's entire timeline, it is reasonable to argue that it is precisely this element that sustains that dimension of the franchise and articulates its temporal coherence.

Furthermore, let us think beyond Toy Story itself and turn instead to the identity of Disney Pixar, to the tradition of the Disney Pixar sound. This tradition becomes a network of mediations whose fabric is woven through our emotions and through the ways we navigate different structures and institutions such as nostalgia, family, and society.

Let us visualise it. If we observe the cartography of these mediations, it becomes much easier to perceive what remains constant within the network. We realise that the only enduring node is the musical one, sustained in this case (predominantly) by composers Randy Newman and Michael Giacchino, who have shaped the scores of internal Pixar franchises such as Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles, and Cars, among many others.

This suggests that music has been displaced to the periphery rather than recognised as the very core of the cinematic product. But what would happen if we displaced the coordinates of that very periphery?

If music has been the franchise's most stable element for over three decades, why do we continue to position it as though it were merely peripheral? Perhaps the problem has never been the music itself, but rather the place from which we have learned to listen to it, both culturally and historically.

Epilogue

It is possible that, across much of Latin America, artistic disciplines would not have been relegated to a marginal position. It is possible that major global television networks would not suspend the live broadcast of music award ceremonies. Perhaps, just perhaps, those who design this profoundly significant territory would be given a greater opportunity to speak during major award ceremonies instead of being interrupted minutes before representatives from other fields...

But then again, if the world truly revolved around those perspectives, perhaps music would lose its subtle power to organise our emotional lives. After all, most of the decisions that move us, the decisions through which we determine how we feel, how we inhabit the world, where we choose to express ourselves, and from where we relate to others, surely have nothing to do with emotion...

Perhaps it would be worth asking instead: which groups benefit from this isolation and from this particular perspective? Who (or what) might feel threatened if our gaze... or rather, our listening... were to change?

One thing for another...