Toy Story 3: Does "all other persons" include movie toys?

Someday, I will thank my friend at aftertheflood for introducing me to Crooked Timber. You don't need a hit every day (more like weekly), so you don't quite believe it's an addiction. They also have enough variety in the voices to keep me from staying mad at the entire blog for any length of time.

I direct your attention to the June 21 CT post Stinky Pete as Existential Hero. Here's a snippet:

Haven’t seen the new one yet (it will be the four year old’s first movie in the theatre, so we are trying to figure out a family expedition, so that everyone can enjoy him enjoying it), but its arrival reminds me that I’ve been meaning for ages to post on how Toy Story 2 maps out the major themes of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. They both are driven by the same basic idea – of highly intelligent, potentially autonomous creatures who define their happiness entirely in terms of the happiness of others. In Never Let Me Go, this makes the (liberal) reader quite queasy. In Toy Story 2, this is treated as an entirely happy and natural state of affairs.

The comments at the above post are a full day ahead of me and they're holding their own. So I will just note that any thread on a non-sf blog that references Gene Wolfe, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny without condescension can't be all bad. Eventually someone uses the "S" word (slavery) and the Stockholm syndrome in describing the Toy Story characters, and that's the other thing that caught my attention. As of this writing, no one has mentioned Al Capp's two self-sacrificing species, the Schmoo and the inexorably multi-racial Kigmy, but they're slouching towards such mention in the later comments.

The comments also link out to a related article at Overthinking It.

Have fun!