Last week I took the boy to see Toy Story 3D.  Remembering the disaster that was our last movie theatre outing, this time I came armed with yarn to tie the glasses onto his head, banned popcorn, and knew that the terror alert level was low.  (Last time, halfway through the movie, he cried, “I can’t see anything!” Looking through his 3D glasses, they were coated in a thick crust of popcorn butter goo.)  The yarn worked like a charm, and there were no PTSD-inducing scenes. All in all a successful outing this time.

I hadn’t seen Toy Story in years, but largely remembered the story.  Now, I understand that any movie that involves talking and walking toys requires some degree of a suspension of disbelief, but for the most part the film stays true to the rules of the universe it sets up for itself.  In the last scene, Woody and Buzz race to get into the moving van taking their owner to his new house.  This is where Pixar loses me.  I can accept that toys could open the back of a moving van door, I can accept the firecracker taking them through the air to land through a moonroof into the car, but there is one thing I cannot accept.

The back of the moving van is largely empty.

Now, as someone who has moved multiple times and finds it to be a huge pain, as do most people, this is too much disbelief for me to bear.  There is no furniture crammed in, no random garbage bag filled with soft clothes, just boxes stacked up only filling one third of the van.  How could a single mom with two kids and a two story house fit into a ten foot moving van with SPACE LEFT OVER? Or why wouldn’t she have rented a smaller van? Really, Pixar, you couldn’t spring to at least draw the couch in?

Sigh.

We then watched a bit of Toy Story 2 last night at home, which is an even funnier movie, I think.  I loved the other movie references thrown out to adults: the “Jurassic Park” scene, when T.rex is running and you see his image in the side-view mirror, the “Star Wars” story line,  and some others I probably missed.  Then I realized, for the boy it will be the other way around.  When he sees “Star Wars” for the first time, he’ll exclaim, (big intake of air) “It’s just like Buzz and Zurg from Toy Story!!”

And thus does the timeline of cinematographic history go awry.