Toy Story 4: Road Warrior
On a previous post I wrote a piece criticising popular kids movie Toy Story. Utilising my trademark penetrating insight and spirit crushing cynicism I pointed out how the villain of the original film, Sid, was actually its hero. How his creative spirit, condemned in the film's narrative, was a light of liberty in contrast to the corporate produced slavery of the apparent heroes. It's very clever, you should go read it.
I recently paid some of my parental dues by taking my boys to see the new addition to the series, Toy Story 4. In it Woody and co find themselves on a road trip with their new owner, Bonnie's favourite new toy, a plastic fork she's called Forky, that she's decorated herself on her first day at nursery.
Whilst on the road they run into former roommate and love interest, Bo-Peep, who's been freewheeling with other discarded toys near a fairground since she was last seen in Part 2. They team up to rescue Forky, who finds himself trapped by some freaky old doll and her minaret minions inside a second hand store.
I expected the film to be a rerun of the same old twee Toy Story tropes,
I disagree with those criticisms. Ultimately this was a different film with a different more radical message befitting our troubled times.
There's a familiar reactionary aspect to an awful lot of kids content. A common moral amongst them is - everything's just A-OK as it is. No need for change. You just be exactly as you are. Accept the status quo.
The earlier Toy Story films fit this mould perfectly. Things change around the characters (there wouldn't be much of a story of it didn't) but ultimately everything goes back to 'as it should be'. In Woody and Co's case this involved returning to a condition of slavery. In the third part their determination to return to their jail, presented, through Woody, as an admirable trait, would have meant their condemnation to eternal obsolescence in the loft. It was chance that they ended up being passed on to Bonnie, their new slave master.
Part 4 dispenses with the idea that this blind, Stockholm syndrome-like loyalty is a positive thing. In it we see Bo Peep, having shaken off the shackles of her original culturally determined, passive, feminine role turned into a powerful, independent leader of fellow travellers, with an implied free and fluid sexuality shared with another small toy called Giggles Mcdimples. She no longer sees loyalty to an arbitrarily proscribed master as at all desirable.
Along with this, Bonnie's new favourite toy, Forky, is the product of her own creative imagination, the very thing condemned in the original. Her attachment to this creation of her own leads to Woody being further rejected by his master. In the earlier films this would've been stoically borne by Woody. An immutable circumstance of his nature as a toy. In Part 4 however, as the story comes to a close, Woody thinks,
'fuck this for a lark! I could spend my life gathering dust at the bottom of a cupboard or I could live my life with an independent, beautiful, lady toy (and Giggles Mcdimples). I can put a brick through the other guy's windshield. Take it out and chop it up. I could be reckless. I could be free!'
Of course Tom Hanks doesn't say that in the film, more's the pity, but, essentially, that's what he does. He leaves Bonnie and his crew and joins Bo-Peep and the free. It's quite a radical moral to an otherwise mainstream story produced by corporate America and it's perhaps a positive sign of where our culture is heading. Lord knows we need some.
There's another thing that this rejection of the status quo ending is, which is no doubt why it's avoided in most children's stories. It's unsettling. Destabilising. This pill is sweetened in Toy Story 4 because it's funny. We can laugh, though we don't know where these characters we love are going to end up. There's no trite re-establishing of the old order. There's probably not going to be any more sequels. Their future, just as our future, is unknown.
Bo-Peep, Woody and the free folk are going where Buzz Lightyear forever declared he'd head but never had the nerve to boldly go - to infinity and beyond.