Where could they possibly go
from here? I had some anxieties about Toy Story 4 because in my mind,
the Toy Story trilogy was just that: a trilogy. Toy Story 3,
aside from being one of Pixar’s greatest and thematically richest accomplishments,
was such a perfect capstone to that entire saga, that I felt there was nowhere
else they could possibly go afterward. Turns out I was wrong. When you get down
to it, Toy Story is a very spiritual series, with Woody’s constant need
for a kid to look after being akin to the onset of parenthood or the pursuit of
a relationship with God. By comparison, Toy Story 4 is an atheistic
tale, where our characters ask themselves what it means to be a toy at all,
especially one without a child to play with.
After Andy gave his toys to
Bonnie at the end of Toy Story 3, Woody (Tom Hanks) has found himself being
played with less and less as time goes by, but insists on being a guardian
angel to her anyway. This becomes a greater challenge than expected with the
arrival of Forky (Tony Hale), an arts and crafts project willed to life by
Bonnie deciding he is a toy, but is frightened, confused, hyper-aware that he’s
made of garbage and keeps trying to dispose himself. Woody tries to teach Forky
the ways of toyhood and prevent him from throwing himself in the nearest waste bin.
This gets them separated from the rest of the gang during a family road trip,
leading them to a small-town antique shop where they run into Woody’s old friend
Bo Peep (Annie Potts), who was given away sometime between parts 2 and 3 and
now lives freely as a nomadic survivor. Meanwhile, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen)
must navigate a hazardous carnival across the street to find Woody and Forky
before Bonnie notices they’re missing.
It was clear from the onset
that if the Toy Story saga was going to continue, they’d have to take a
radically different approach, and since it’s been stretched over twenty-five
years and explored nearly every possible avenue of its own premise, Pixar has
concluded that there’s nowhere else to go but full-blown existential. What is
there to do once you’ve fulfilled your purpose? Is life even worth living after
that purpose is fulfilled? What does it even mean to be alive? Woody’s
mantra throughout this series has been that a toy’s sole purpose in life is to
provide happiness to a child, but has been presented with challenges or perversions
of that ideology. Buzz’s arrival challenged his authority as Andy’s favorite
toy. Jessie and Stinky Pete sought immortality by being preserved in a toy
museum in Toy Story 2 at the cost of never being played with again. The
daycare in Toy Story 3 seemed like a paradise where toys get to be
played with forever on the surface, only to reveal itself to be a torture
chamber. Toy Story 4, which is more of a Woody solo story than the
others, shows him that life without ownership is possible.
Woody, of course, being a
relic of a bygone era, keeps forcing himself into the guardian role whether it’s
required of him or not. It’s this stubbornness that inadvertently leads to the
creation of Forky. Where all the other toys are store-bought and factory-made,
Forky is a grotesque parody of the rest of the cast, a Frankenstein’s monster horrified
by his own sentience, tormented by the awareness and obsessed with his own disposability.
He’s also my favorite movie character of the year, and I have a strong feeling
that millennials everywhere will be adopting him as their new icon. This
existential questioning is compounded by the knowledge that Bo Peep, who shows
Woody that there is in fact life for toys without children, is not a toy but a porcelain
statue who was also imbued with life simply by being treated as a toy, but Pixar
understands that the logical inner workings of its universe aren’t as important
as the emotional mechanics and doesn’t try to delve into how these things work.
Instead, the plot pivots to a
rescue mission to save Forky from the antique shop after he’s held hostage by the
film’s primary antagonist Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks), a defective talking
doll who covets Woody’s voice box and lords over the store with a squad of eerily
voiceless ventriloquist dummies. Much like Stinky Pete and Lotso Huggin’ Bear
before her, she’s driven mainly by a desire for affection and a fear of neglect,
but unlike them, never had a child of her own. The gang is joined by a new set of
toys, including Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves), a Canadian Evil Knievel type stunt
driving action figure, Giggle McDimples (Ali Maki), a tiny Polly Pocket-esque
policewoman, and Ducky and Bunny (Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele), a pair
of conjoined, smack-talking carnival prize stuffed animals who provide the film’s
best running gag. The original cast, by comparison, is given significantly less
to do. Buzz’s mission across the carnival doesn’t add up to much beyond
catching up with the main plot, but he does experience a sort of existential quandary
of his own when he mistakes his speaker buttons for a moral compass, the “inner
voice” Woody alluded to akin to his own pullstring. The rest of the toy gang is
given even less to do, relegated to Greek Chorus whose only real purpose is to
make sure Bonnie’s family doesn’t drive off before the mission is complete.
Bottom line, I wasn’t sure
where exactly Toy Story 4 could’ve gone, but I’m glad it went in the
direction that it did. While it doesn’t even try to match the nuclear assault
on your emotions that the twin climaxes of Toy Story 3 was, it’s by far
the loosest and breeziest chapter of the saga, and provides a tremendously satisfying
conclusion to a story that I only thought was over before. Where could they have
possibly gone from here? The answer is simple: to infinity and beyond.
9/10
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