The following is both a review and treatise on a current release movie. It features extensive plot spoilers. You were warned.
During the last 15 years, the Toy Story franchise has had 3 successful movies along with a slew of re-marketing of old toy concepts. Everything from Etch-a-Sketch to Slinky Dogs has made a comeback, even if they were in the form pictured in the movies. The movies feature big name acting talent, huge budgets, and state of the art animation and production. Even the writing has been widely praised for appealing to both the children they are marketed to and the adults who paid for the tickets and will have to take the little bastards home at the end of 103 minutes, stuffed with popcorn, soda, and nachos.
While the third movie has been praised extensively for its engrossing, emotional storyline and superlative character animation, depicting flawless emotional response, it also featured an increasingly dark probing of psychological fears not seen in the previous films. Indeed, it's not very common at all for films targeted at children to get so deep that adults in the audience might be wondering, "Holy shit, really?!"
There were five particular moments from the film which struck a nerve in our psyche, bringing up every phobia-inducing moment, from the sexually charged adolescence to the final acceptance of a terrible, painful death.
Woody's Longing OR "What the toys saw..."
Early in the movie, we learn that Andy (the human character owning all the toys) has now aged to the hormonally inebriated age of 17 and is getting ready to venture off to college. Thanks to the montage of flashback scenes shown via his mother's home movies (his father hasn't been around in a long time, apparently, which explains some of Andy's later issues "letting go" of Woody), backed by Randy Newman's phlegm throated warbling, we see Andy's tween years, playing happily with all his toys and no friends or other children save for his pesky younger sister (given that the sister, Molly,
showed up in the second movie following a fatherless first movie indicates Mom likes to still get down, but couldn't seal the deal and get the new dad to stay). In the present, the toys are acting on a plot using cellphones they stole from the humans to attract Andy's attention back to the toybox. Which brings us to this image of Woody, his face welling up in both joy and sorrow at hearing Andy's voice on the phone after presumably so long.
[caption id="attachment_716" align="aligncenter" width="614" caption="A mixture of longing and loathing?"]
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Not only do we have this heartstring plucking scene of Woody's emotional mask slipping away for a second and his yearning to once again be "played with" by his owner revealed, we are also faced with some troubling questions about the toys' lives up to now. This is Andy's room and he has obviously not gotten rid of things as he aged. His toybox still sits in the same place, for crying out loud, and there is the addition of a laptop computer on his desk. The toys were present....and WITNESS TO....some of the most private, exploratory moments a teenage boy, alone in his room with a computer has during the onset of puberty. What did the toys do? Did they try to avoid each other's gaze, pretending to be in "toy mode" and not really paying attention? Did they wonder what Andy might be doing to himself, possibly partially clothed, with possible confusing images on his computer screen? It's one thing to experience finding out what makes the toy work which will control you the rest of your life. It's quite another to imagine there were witnesses to the whole experience, in the form of your cherished playthings.
They called it "play time"
Through a series of mishaps, misunderstandings, and misogyny (NONE of this would have happened if his stupid sister hadn't distracted Andy and his stupid mom had stopped to look UP at the partially closed attic door), the toys find themselves being donated to a local daycare center. There, they are greeted warmly by the other toys, particular the leader, a stuffed purple lion-type toy called Lots O' Huggin' Bear (seriously, he looks like an attempt at a lion). He eventually brings the hero toys to their side of the daycare center, introducing us to one of his hench--..., er,
associate toys, a giant baby doll, named Big Baby. This is not psychologically jarring, however, just fucking terrifying nonetheless. Woody parts ways with the other toys, his co-dependency issues of "being there" for a 17 year old college-bound Andy not letting him just move on. Buzz and the remaining toys get into position for the small children at the day care to come back in from recess, when Buzz starts to notice something in the room:
[caption id="attachment_717" align="aligncenter" width="614" caption="Terror, thy name is Child"]
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The native toys have all hidden themselves or are in the act of hiding, and basically doing the equivalent of the kid from
Ransom pissing down his leg when hears Gary Sinise's voice. Whatever is coming is equivalent to whatever has happened to take these toys into a pants-shittingly terrified catatonic state. The next scenes show why, as Buzz and the crew are thrown, snotted on, painted, beaten, and disassembled in something resembling a Gitmo torturer's childhood training. After the kids leave, the toys are somewhat "sore", but we are lead to believe the other toys have endured this daily, maybe even for years and years. Holy shit, did I mention Gitmo? Forget that, this is Saddam's rape rooms we are talking about here. So emotionally and mentally broken that they hide beneath furniture and tremble, doing the toy-equivalent of shivering in puddles of fear-piss, the trauma is stupefying. Even if they were rescued, no therapy, no medication could ease their suffering by the looks of raw, stark terror on their toy faces.
Woody, in the meantime, has been relocated to Bonnie's house, a vaguely Latina child resembling a shy
Dora the Explorer who has every bit as an active imagination as the pre-teen Andy once had in Woody's fond pre-self-abuse-witnessing memories. Turns out another toy associated with Lotso's crew is also there, a morose and somewhat creepy looking clown doll named Chuckles, who stares out a moonlit window missing only the bottle of gin a G-rated movie couldn't allow. From him we get Lotso's backstory, how he, Big Baby, and Chuckles all once belonged to a child named Daisy. Through a unfortunate mistake and inattentive parenting, the three favorite toys get left at a rest stop after Daisy falls asleep, her mother and father content only to pick up the recyclables, the child, but not her fucking toys. Lotso's determination to return home brings the toys, at last, to Daisy's house. There, Lotso discovers he has been replaced by a new version of him, another Lots O' Huggin' Bear (still looks like a lion). He lies and tells the other toys they have been replaced too. At this point, he becomes unrelentingly evil.
The Monster's Contemplation
Back in the present, the daycare has now turned into the third season of
Lost, with some toys imprisoned and tortured, some working for the Others, er, Lotso's crew, and some simply shacking up in the dreamhouse (Barbie is a whore and Ken is a closeted homosexual, as is hinted throughout the movie. No, seriously, all the characters continually cast sidelong glances at each other whenever Ken's "girl's toy" side comes out). Big Baby is revealed to be the smoke-monster, basically, and acts as the muscle of the entire operation, ruthlessly casting toys into the "box" for overnight stays in sand and cat poop.Woody finally manages to return to begin plotting an escape. The toys quickly begin acting on the plan, with it appearing to work, right up to this point.
[caption id="attachment_718" align="aligncenter" width="614" caption="When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back"]
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They stumble upon Big Baby, sitting alone in a swing, a scene reminiscent of Chuckles' earlier flashbacks to happier times with Daisy. The monster-doll is staring up toward the moon with those dead eyes, one broken and half lidded, the other wide, round, and full of a kind of loss and lack of conscience only to be found in two foot tall sentient infant simulacrums. What is it thinking? Does it have clear memories of those earlier times? Is it planning how it will next dismember an out of line plush toy? Is that longing in those plastic orb eyes or merely the empty gaze in the space of time between horrific acts of violence? Whatever it is, it strikes to the very soul and makes one wonder if it's the abyss we are seeing or what happens after staring into the abyss too long. All we know for sure is that it's a murder-doll and our heroes are accessory-shitting scared of it. (Side note: It looks like the animators paid some homage to another series of movies here, when one of the squeezy alien toys makes a chirp and alerts Big Baby, we see the terrifying thing waddle toward our heroes, the camera pulling back to an overhead shot of the Baby looking over a ledge very much like the Wraith peering over the log looking for Frodo. Or I could just be reading too much into their penchant for paying homages.)
Big Baby Pulls a Vader
Woody and crew eventually manage to reach their goal, standing on the edge of the trash dumpster they will use as an escape vehicle only to be confronted once again by Lotso and his cronies. The two sides stand across the open maw of the dumpster. Lotso offers another chance for the toys to return to the daycare and take the brutal torture of the younger children so Lotso and his chosen ones can remain with the older kids. Woody and the gang naturally refuse, but this time Woody brings up Lotso's past with Daisy. He eventually proves his knowledge by tossing Big Baby's nametag across the gap, something Lotso had once ripped from the Baby's neck upon discovering he had been replaced. Lotso loses his shit and starts monologuing his frustration, letting it all out in a stream of invective of his lot in life. Meanwhile, Big Baby only realizes that its "mama" (said in an eery baby doll voice when looking down at the nametag) never really replaced it at all (though in all likelihood, if Daisy's parents lazily replaced one cherished toy with an identical model, they replaced all of them). In yet another homage-appearing scenes, Big Baby interrupts Lotso's angry speech (read: lightening bolt torture of the hero) with a surprise over-the-head lift and proceeds to throw Lotso into the stinky depths of the garbage dumpster (read: Death Start open tunnel....seriously, am I the only one who caught the reference?).
[caption id="attachment_724" align="aligncenter" width="614" caption="The only thing missing is Lotso doing Force x-rays of Big Baby"]
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Now free to get back home, the toys once again find themselves caught, this time by chance as one of them gets stuck in the lid of the dumpster. They
all wind up in the dumpster and a terrifying ride to the dump. Managing to stay together and also rescue a trapped Lotso (he's good now), they dodge a perplexing gauntlet of trash-shredding machinery. Eventually they wind up on a conveyor belt full of trash shreds only to discover the belt dumps them into an incinerator! They scramble to wade through the quicksand like chips of trash, trying to outrun the conveyor backwards. Lotso notices an emergency stop switch atop a ladder, but can't quite make it, calling on Buzz and Woody to (once again) save him. He climbs the ladder, reaches toward the switch and....fuck (oh, nevermind, he's still soulless and evil).
The End
This is where things reach a traumatically scarring plateau. The toys are scrambling to avoid this new danger, now beautifully animated as a kind of Dante's inferno of plastic toy melting hellfire. They struggle in the shifting morass of trash, some of them slipping, others barely able to hang on as the whole room is seemingly angled towards this ultimate doom in the center of the room. The music is swelling, the sheer desperation evident on each toy's face. Finally, Jesse (the girl cowboy doll) wails to Buzz "what do we do?!?"
Buzz appears to almost have a plan on the tip of his tongue, but then stops. His face sort of relaxes, but also like it's about to cry. He reaches out to take Jesse's hand, his eyes communicating to her this is it. This is the moment they will die. Jesse reaches over to comfort a clearly hysterical Bullseye (cowboy horse), one by one the toys all relax, find each other's hand with expressions of resignation, clearly too tired to fight any further, exhausted both mentally and physically, not to mention being emotionally drained by the horrors they have witnessed. Buzz finally reaches out to Woody, his long time friend. This is it.
[caption id="attachment_719" align="aligncenter" width="614" caption="And now, the end is near, and so I face, the final curtain...."]
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Holy. Fucking. Shit. Seriously? It was one of the most heart wrenching moments in animated filmmaking I have personally ever witnessed (apart from when Scar the lion convinces Simba that he killed his father, while his father's likely-still twitching body is right there). A deeply horrific situation, imminent actual death is involved, and characters who are battle worn and weary, standing bravely next to each other's side to the last, now accepting their fate, perhaps even welcoming it. These are not things I can imagine most children being able to identify with let alone comprehend. Or, at least, I hope most children cannot. This scene was both so utterly terrifying for our heroes of a decade and half to face and completely searing to any psychological balance possible following the emotional roller coaster of the film that it's a wonder parents were able to drive their kids home without first holding everyone in a tear-filled family group hug, possibly involving several families at once.
This explains the movie's ending, which is appropriately long enough to allow for everyone to dry their eyes, maybe hold a loved one close, perhaps even make a mental note to no longer take for granted the small moments of life and to live each day as it's your last. We find Andy finally leaving for college, only to take his toys (yes, they fucking made it, the movie isn't Shakespeare, after all) to Bonnie's house, where we discover that Andy was obviously involved in the drama club at school (explains his lack of friends) and that Dora, I mean Bonnie is destined for the same fate as she parts ways with Andy surrounded by her trove of new toys. She waves Woody's arm goodbye to Andy, who catches his breath, almost tearing up, before getting into his car to travel to school and his first actual sexual experience involving other humans.
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