The Pope, Pixar, Parents, Pastors and ‘Toy Story 5’
(ANALYSIS) Vatican watchers rarely scan papal speeches looking for links to Hollywood.
But at the Vatican Summer Youth Camp, Pope Leo XIV offered an unusually timely update on faith in a digital age.
“The family that is together, it is not enough that we are all there. Each, they look at his phone,” the pope said.
Even if believers “have the Bible and some prayers in the phone, God doesn't want to look at the phone: God wants to look at our hearts, our life. And therefore, be free from these things that in themselves can be fun, a help, a nice thing.”
After all, he added: “We are not all plugged into a cable. We are human beings.”
That June 22 talk came three days after "Toy Story 5" reached theaters, with Sheriff Woody, Buzz Lightyear and cowgirl Jesse urging their young owner, Bonnie, to escape the grip of her digital Lilypad tablet.
The pope’s words were “remarkably Toy Story-coded,” wrote Alyssa Murphy of the National Catholic Register. In Pixar's parable, Bonnie's parents took a stand and deleted the social media app that mean girls were using to mock her affection for old-fashioned toys.
That’s the good news, noted Murphy.
The bad news?
“Currently sitting on store shelves nationwide is a physical ‘Lilypad’ device ... marketed to preschoolers between the ages of 3 and 5. ... Presented as a beginner device, the item description reads: 'Stay connected with Jessie, Buzz, Woody and the Tech Trio by texting them.’”
Meanwhile, the Australian Psychological Society has published a survey of international research showing that most children, by age 2, have access to digital devices, including some babies as young as 6 months old. By age 4, 75% of children have their own digital devices. In the end, the more time children gaze at screens, the less they play, talk, sleep and, thus, develop their minds and bodies.
At the box office, “Toy Story 5” is nearing $1 billion in global ticket sales. The movie isn’t perfect, but religious leaders should note what Pixar got right about parents getting involved in the digital lives of their children, said consultant Mark Rodgers of the Clapham Group.
At the moment, the key is “parents really living into the realities of their children’s lives, with their own interactions with tech, even when that's outside of their own families," said Rodgers, reached by Zoom. "AI is a different danger. It's too ... predatory, and I mean that. AI is proactive in ways that are cunning, and I don't think that putting rating guides on things is sufficient to keep AI away from kids.”
Tech giants creating AI programs for children are “not fighting fair, which is why parents need allies,” said Rodgers. That includes clergy and religious educators.
Early in “Toy Story 5,” the audience sees a vision of "house after house in Bonnie’s neighborhood, every window lit by the cold blue glow of a screen, with a child or adult alone in each room, a light that gives no warmth," wrote Rodgers on the Clapham website.
Later, a happy family “camps in the dark, gathered close, their faces lit gold by a real fire and the soft glow of the camp lights. One light isolates while the other gathers. One is artificial while the other is real. Nearly the whole argument of the movie is in the difference between those two glows.”
Rodgers noted that Pixar released “Toy Story 5” just before Father's Day and, unlike previous offerings in this series, a father and mother are shown working together to address their child's crisis.
“The film is a clear-eyed portrait of the effects social media can have on a child, and brave in its prescription. It makes a subtle case for screen-time limits, in-person play, and the importance of imagination. ... It is not subtle about the harm of social media,” he wrote.
“This is about to get harder, as the more personal these devices become, the more they can route around the very safeguards we put in place.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.