Theme Of Animism In The Movie Toy Story

Toy story, deemed as Pixar 's best film, launched a brand new era in filmmaking and gave birth to animations. In the Toy Story movie series, it showed the idea of animism where all objects possess a soul through humanlike behaviors of the toys. Pixar indicated this belief of animism by bringing the toys to life and giving them characteristics, which then concludes that they have a soul. These toys pretend to be inanimate objects when their owners are around and they come to life with a mind of their own when their owners are out of sight. Animism is a religion or worldview that believes there is a spirit or soul behind every object of the physical world. (Szombathy) “The English word “animism” has Latin roots and means ‘soul’ or ‘life’. It

It seems as if the toys have a soul, contains a soul, but only shows it when their owners are unaware of it. These toys instinctively know how to act in front of their human owners and proceeds to act freely when the humans are gone. Animists believe that natures have their own souls, but just like the toys in the movie, why can we not see their soul? If the physical world and the spiritual world are as connected as they believe, we as humans who also posses a soul, should be able to see the souls of these inanimate objects, but we do not. On the flip side, the idea of having multiple gods such as Woody or Buzz goes against the christian worldview. Animists worship anything like trees, rocks and plants, but in the Bible it says that christians believe in only one God, “ The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” ( Deuteronomy 6:4) So animists believe in more than one God, where as our christian worldview teaches us that there is only one. In result of their belief that there is a different god for each part of nature, they believe that different gods together made and created the universe. This does not align with scripture because in Genesis 1 and 2, it states that God created the universe and him alone. Overall, the fact that Andy puts so much value and love into all the different toys, it makes none of the toys actually “special.” Similar to reality, if Andy loved all the toys equally, then none of them are truly special to him. In reality, if all inanimate objects have a soul and can be worshipped, then that counters the initial definition of a “god”, which is to have superhuman being or spirit. If everything has a soul or spirit, then it is not “superhuman”, it is simply just normal to be have a soul, making none of them worthy to be called a god. We call our god, God, because he can perform and do things that none of us can, in a way that we will never understand. We worship only God,