In which a grown man grouses for 600 words about a computer-animated comedy that left him cold. More like The Gaijin Grump, amirite?
Toy Story 4, which hits digital platforms today, has a lot of moving parts. It’s like an action figure with too many points of articulation. It might make me a bad person, but at the risk of going all Armond White on you, I have to confess: I couldn’t get into it. I couldn’t figure out what the actual toy story was.
Was it Woody and Bo Peep’s love story, or a story about Forky’s identity, or a Lotso-esque tale about Gabby Gabby, or what? It feels like the series is always manufacturing new ways for Woody to break off on his own, as if he really wants to go solo and have this thing be more of a Tom Hanks vehicle.
Toy Story 3 already refreshed the franchise with new characters, but this time around, most of the old ensemble is left waiting in an RV while the film introduces even more new toys, some of whom will undoubtedly help Disney sell real toys to consumers. Have you bought your Ducky and Bunny plush dolls yet, America?
Keanu Reeves enters the fray as Duke Caboom, and it’s amusing to hear his voice deliver the catchphrase, “Yes, I Canada.” Key & Peele are scene-stealers, and it’s equally amusing to hear their stuffed-animal counterparts banter and see them fantasize repeatedly about bum-rushing humans. But I started to feel like the movie was juggling an inordinate number of subplots, padding its runtime with digressions that didn’t hang together enough in a cohesive whole.
What’s the organizing principle for this movie? What’s its central theme? Is it about listening to your inner voice, being true to who you are? It seems to me that Forky had a pretty clear sense of who he was, right from the get-go. Let him be trash, I kept thinking. That’s how he identifies. The trash can is clearly the place where Forky feels most at home in this world.
Yeah, yeah: the movie probably wants to teach kids that they’re meant for a greater purpose, that their lives have more value than trash, and all that good stuff. To Woody — who has already been to the hell of a landfill incinerator and back — Forky just seems dead set on ritual toy suicide. Watching Sheriff Pride police other toys, corralling Forky and dragging him along the road, however, one can almost detect a faint undercurrent of, “Don’t be who you are. Be who I want you to be, because I’m the leader. Bonnie gave you life: you must give up your dreams, do your duty, and serve her!”
I appreciate that Woody himself goes against this in the end, finding a second act as a lost toy with Bo Peep and a new crew. The thing is, he already found a second act with Bonnie at the end of the last movie.
I guess I just found Toy Story 3 more moving. This four-quel was less emotionally charged; I think the final goodbye between Woody and his old friends, Andy and Bonnie’s toys, might have been more meaningful had they not been pushed to the background the whole movie.
At the end of the day, maybe I’m just not the world’s biggest Pixar fan. Chalk it up to me being a childless millennial, as they say. I’ve enjoyed some of the studio’s other recent movies, like Coco and Incredibles 2, and I’ve previously written about how Toy Story 3 warmed the cockles of my cold, dead heart. With Toy Story 4, though, I felt like I was just watching another installment in a franchise that may never end. Not a bad movie, but certainly not life-changing.