That her own voicebox no longer works is, she believes, the reason she has never experienced a child’s love. The two team up to rescue Forky from a terrifying secondhand store, where an old-fashioned doll (voiced by Christina Hendricks) commands a platoon of zombie-like ventriloquist dummies and wants to lure Woody there so that she can cut him open and steal his voice box. She has never seemed happier, and Woody, her erstwhile beau, is both intrigued and intimidated by Bo’s brashness and sexual agency. Rather than being devastated, Peep has traded the love of one child for more temporary dalliances with a series of kids at the local park. Having peered into this abyss, Toy Story 4 chooses (wisely, probably) not to spelunk in it, and instead becomes a kind of love story between Woody and Bo Peep (voiced by Annie Pots) who has flourished after being discarded by Bonnie. Was this a not-so-subtle comment on capitalism-as-death-cult? Uh… I mean, I doubt it, but it’s still kind of awesome. Woody spends basically the next 20 minutes of screen time trying to get Forky to be the toy Bonnie wants him to be and stop him from jumping into garbage cans (Forky returning to his grave, essentially).Ĭan we pause here to recognize how wonderfully dark this storyline is? I don’t know what I expected from a fourth Toy Story movie, but it was not Woody trying to coax other sentient toys away from death’s dank embrace. And Forky, rather than being excited about his promotion from presumably inanimate pieces of garbage to full consciousness and favored toy status, now desperately wants to go back to being insensate trash. (is Woody a fucktoi? Discuss.) Only instead of turning to Woody for solace, Bonnie constructs for herself a new toy out of a spork, a pipe cleaner, a broken popsicle stick, and some clay, a character she names “Forky.”įollowing its own narrative rules, in turning trash into a toy, Bonnie has inadvertently made Forky sentient. Which frankly seems like kind of a fuckboi move. In a last-ditch effort at relevance, Woody stows away in Bonnie’s backpack on her first day of kindergarten, hoping to catch her eye at an emotionally vulnerable time. Our hero, Woody the wind-up cowboy, has been passed down from his original owner, Andy - having gone off to college - to Bonnie, who seems to prefer other toys to Woody (including, Jessie, the female version of Woody voiced by Joan Cusack). Where to go from there? In Toy Story 4, the franchise transitions from fear of death to exploring the desire for it. Not exactly a brand new idea for children’s entertainment ( Winnie The Pooh, The Giving Tree, Peter Pan, et al), but a pretty well-played trick nonetheless. The Pixar boys managed to flip the concept so that it wasn’t about stuff per se, but a bittersweet riff on the ephemeral nature of childhood. This came to a head with the incinerator scene in Toy Story 3, when the characters hold hands while facing down the inevitability of death, a scene that should be laughable coming from anthropomorphized toys in glorified toy company movie but nonetheless gets me embarrassingly sniffly every time. Anyone could understand it and it could punch as hard as it wanted and cook up the emotion.One of the greatest tricks the Toy Story franchise ever pulled was turning what on the surface looks like this consumerist paean to stuff into a poignant riff on mortality. God damn.Įmotional simplicity at its best. Andy playing with the little girl and being a child again, his final glance back to the toys before he leaves. I even want to cry as I'm writing this, everything about the scene. Andy was doing a lot more than saying goodbye to his toys, he was saying goodbye to his childhood. When Andy finally drives off but not without saying goodbye, emphasis on Woody and Buzz in particular. I had tears in my eyes, a grown 24 year old. Andy giving away all the toys one by one but his struggle to let go of Woody - That said it all. It actually appealed to people in real life, the struggles and obstacles of growing up and letting go of the past. Absolutely heartbreaking, but in a good way. I re-watched that ending scene recently and for some reason it hit more much harder than it would have the first time around when I was a teenager and the movie was released.
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