1. I'm in my seat, at the Majestic Bay Theater in Ballard, Seattle. My three year old daughter is with me. We're watching Toy Story 3 and Woody and the gang have been flung into an incinerator with no possible way out. It's the most beautiful and terrifying cinematic moment in 2010. My daughter turns to me and whispers, "Are they going to be okay?" I whisper back, "They'll get out somehow." But I'm thinking: Jesus Christ, I think they're really going to fucking kill them.

2. There's something hostile about the world of Toy Story 3, in a way that isn't true of the other two films. Yes, the outside world in the previous two films is dangerous, whether it's Sid and his explosives or the oncoming traffic just outside of Al's Toy Barn. But Sid is merely the flipside of Andy -- his love is differently expressed -- and the traffic has no particular grievance against toys. But in this film, holy shit, nearly everyone is out to get them: Lotso and his goons imprison them (and brainwash Buzz), the goopy daycare kids want to smear fluids on them and throw them against the walls, and even benign objects, like a triple-ply garbage bag or a yellow kite, seemingly possess antagonistic desires. What Toy Story 3 feels like, dramatically, is watching Woody and the gang huddle together as the ground crumbles beneath them, and that's before we even get to the incinerator scene.

But there's something else going on. Something below the level of narrative that reinforces the dread that permeates the film, yet also sets up the gut-wrenching catharsis of the climax. Something downright perverse. 

3. Part of what made the first Toy Story so appealing was how well the computer graphics created convincing plastic surfaces, so detailed you could translate the weight of Buzz's space-suited body or Rex's bumpy skin into a real sensation -- you "know" exactly what they feel like. Fifteen years later, the images in Toy Story 3 are now hyperreal, evincing more detail than what we normally perceive. The film could have easily gone with those same nostalgic, seductive surfaces, but instead, director Lee Unkrich engages in what can only be called synaesthetic terrorism.

You can pinpoint exactly where Unkrich and screenwriter Michael Arndt announce this. Woody slices open a shiny garbage bag expecting to find his friends, but is instead greeted with an oozing flow of garbage. The way the garbage slides out of the slit is the queasiest image in the Pixar filmography.

4. After that point, nearly every significant texture, and nearly every significant act of touching, is calculated to produce unease and discomfort. The daycare kids, expressing their joy with saliva and boogers. The sickening clopping sound of the Cymbal Monkey's cymbals. The jagged debris on the conveyor belt. The forced reprogramming of Buzz. Lotso's wet fur. Lotso Huggin' Bear: the very name sounds like a promise, but is actually a threat. Even Lotso's fate, which could've been a million different things, is predicated on sensation: harsh wind in his face and bugs in his mouth.

Unkrich has used Pixar's ability to not only create a material world, but one that is only material, a set of surfaces and dark undersides. Sure, the daycare rooms look like fun (if you're not a toy), but Unkrich and Arndt show us other parts of the building, like the dingy bathroom (Woody is careful to put down tissue so he doesn't have to touch the toilet seat) and the banal, tar-covered roof.

But there's a lack here. Every aspect of the world has been created in microscopic detail, but something has been conspicuously squeezed out. 

5. So there they are, Buzz and Jessie and Bullseye, Hamm and Slinky, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head and Rex, and Woody, surrounded by tiny fragments of metal, plastic and wood -- toy materials -- and inexorably sliding towards a maelstrom of heat and light. There's something almost celestial about the image, like a cosmic marriage of a star and a black hole, and definitely something primal -- heat and metal and plastic and wood were how these toys were made, and it's how they're going out. 

Jessie asks Buzz, can-do Buzz, the guy who always has a plan, she asks him, What are we gonna do? And Buzz can only reply with a look, a look of confusion and terror and helplessness that we've only seen once before, back in the first film, when Buzz finally understood that he was not a spaceman, but a toy. In that moment, Buzz's life truly began. And now, it's about to end forever. To infinity, and beyond.

But Buzz, the toy, makes the most human reaction possible: he takes her hand. Her reaction, the single best bit of animation in Pixar's history, is truthful as it is heartbreaking.

And with that one action, that one touch, all the humanity and joy and love, repressed by ninety minutes of wet fur and oozing garbage, all of it returns, forcibly dissolving the material world. There is now something there that can be felt, but can't be touched. 

6. They don't really die, of course; thankfully, I was not made a liar in front of my daughter. But the tears in my eyes that day, in that theater, the ones that came back revisiting the film on DVD, that come back now, just thinking about it, they tell a different story. No, they didn't die, but they accepted their death, which is the same thing. And they did it with strength and dignity, and they didn't do it alone. Am I crying because I'm happy for them, for their victory, or because I wonder if such a victory is even possible for me?