The Toy Story Franchise Forgot Its Own Message
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/202 ... ge/687570/
This piece from The Atlantic took me on a journey. Embark with me, if you will.
The author gives a brief assessment of Toy Story 5, but the majority of the essay surveys the existing 4 films.
He spends some time establishing his fondness for the franchise and how it was important to him growing up, but he notably abstains from making any similar kinds of remarks toward other Pixar classics, Pixar animation generally, or The Walt Disney Company as a whole. RE: No one would probably ever call him a "Disney Adult," which I'm guessing is how he'd prefer it.
No one could have known at the time, but Toy Story 3 marked the end not just of Andy’s childhood but also of Pixar’s golden age. In the 15 years following the release of the original, the studio delivered an unbroken series of classics: Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and finally Toy Story 3. After that, Pixar still produced some hits—most notably 2015’s Inside Out—but its imprimatur no longer carried the same guarantee. The studio, struggling for the first time to connect with original stories, returned to the well.
Noting that Pixar's non-franchise hits are being rejected, but with little speculation on why. We'll circle back to this.
The Toy Story universe is premised on the idea that toys want more than anything to be played with—that a deep bond with a child is what gives a toy’s existence meaning. “No owners means no heartbreak,” the evil purple teddy bear Lotso assures the other toys as he welcomes them to Sunnyside Daycare at the beginning of Toy Story 3. “We don’t need owners at Sunnyside. We own ourselves! We’re masters of our own fate.” Maybe so, the toys learn, but the love is worth the heartbreak. Toys must throw themselves into the relationship with their child, even though they know that the child will one day leave them behind, and then the toy must do the same thing with another child, and another, and another. Toy Story 4 undermines this core emotional drama of the Toy Story franchise by imagining that toys can simply strike out on their own—that they can be, in Lotso’s words, masters of their own fate. It imagines them less as toys than as people. To me, it will always be non-canon.
Yet another valid assessment of why Toy Story 4 is insulting, even within the context of cashgrab sequels. I've never thought it was just regular franchise wear. The toys graduating from Andy just marked the completion of a circle that should have remained closed. And a Toy Story 5 inherits that same shame.
The movie’s gravest sin, though, might be its very existence. The arrival of Toy Story 4 signaled that the original trilogy’s success had, in a way, compromised its own message. A story about growing up and leaving your toys behind had shaped a generation that had grown up and now could not leave it behind. Pixar can’t leave its toys behind, either (as the release of the 2022 spin-off, Lightyear—a box-office and critical dud—drove home). Of the four upcoming projects the studio has announced, three are sequels. The first of those, set for release later this week, is Toy Story 5.
A pretty accurate summation, which makes his subsequent backtracking all the more frustrating.
We’re not the ones clinging to our toys, Stanton argues. You are! Maybe he has a point. If Toy Story 5 brings joy to a new generation of children, who am I to object because it messes with my beloved trilogy?
And ... this is where my face finds my palm.
This whole "but the KIDS will probably love it, so who I am to stop the turning of the wheel" isn't actually new to the discourse. And neither does it afford due respect to something like the original Toy Story. Would it surprise him to know that it's NOT just that the first movie sold a lot of Buzz Lightyear toys, but that it also works really well as a film? If so, he gives an inordinate amount of real estate to examining why it works. Or maybe he just doesn't think today's kids deserve to have
their stories fairly appraised, and that's why, I'd speculate, he doesn't think Elio is as good as the Pixar movies of
his childhood, and it doesn't occur to him that maybe has something to do with the Pixar sequels which just keep germinating mysteriously.
This whole schtick is just kind of the apotheosizing of a certain rationale that is always assigned to Disney lovers and which is always used to blame them for the state of Hollywood. Like, it's Disney adults killing the film industry and not paid writers who will admit that this move wasn't needed or even very good, but it's awful cute, isn't it? (And you just know that Frozen 3 and 4 will absolutely not receive this same grace for reasons we could probably speculate on ...) Do these people really not see the irony?
By the time Toy Story 6 comes around, I'll imagine someone makes this same observation in The New York Times about how someone should have killed Toy Story 5 in the oven wondering why, oh why these movies are still being made without ever asking "Lord, is it I?"
Much as it offends my principles, I can reconcile myself to the continuation of the franchise—so long as it doesn’t come at the expense of Pixar investing in original stories.
Okay. Who wants to tell him?
