MOVIE REVIEW: Toy Story 4
Ed: whew, I found this unfinished in my blog and decided it was a good time to post it, so here it is, about 2 years after I started writing it, finally finished and published!
I really didn’t think Pixar could do anything better with the Toy Story series than they did with Toy Story 3. Period.
Have you seen TS3? If not, there will be spoilers for both it and TS4 from here on out.
Toy Story 3 was the conclusion of Andy and Woody’s story together. In this movie, Andy grows up and must decide what to do with his beloved childhood toys. Separating the main cast out of the rest of his more casual toys, Andy means to put them in the attic but they accidentally get sent to a daycare instead. Woody alone is chosen to go with Andy to college.
Now, through a movie-long series of shenanigans, Woody goes to rescue his friends and meets a little girl named Bonnie, a daughter of one of his mom’s friends and, over the course of the movie, Bonnie forms a bond with Woody. As Andy leaves for college, he takes his old favorite toys and passes them on to her. Still intending to keep Woody, Bonnie shows loving familiarity with the cowboy and with a tinge of regret, Andy gives his favorite toy to the little girl who loved him too.
What more did that story need?
It was sad because in a way, all of us wanted Woody to stay with Andy and those toys to go on to his kids one day, but was passing them on to another kid who loved them so bad? Objectively not. So with such a great and emotional ending behind them, a conclusion to the story of Woody and Andy, what more did they need?
The answer, really, was nothing. They didn’t need anything else. Apparently, however, they wanted to explore a little further and see how Woody would do without Andy. And this is what Toy Story 4 was really about.
Woody spent a decade or more as the favorite toy in a happy household where he was in charge of the room (referring to the bedroom and its toys). Moving to Bonnie’s, he is no longer the favorite, quickly having become one of the “not chosen” toys that stay behind in the closet during morning playtime.
In a sense, this was the only thing that really bothered me about the movie. They had done a great job of endearing me to Bonnie in Toy Story 3, so having her fully reject Woody so quickly already made her less likeable and in losing my affection for her, I was less concerned about her as the story went on, especially with Woody spending the movie being so relentlessly and even unnecessarily loyal to her… as Woody does.
However, one thing Pixar has done lately is offer something more than just an evil antagonist. Gabby Gabby is genuinely creepy and her ventriloquist dummy guards are downright terrifying. Yet through her treachery, she shows an unending longing, much the same as was had by Stinky Pete the Prospector in Toy Story 2 - she was made with a defective voice box and is now a broken antique in a store that rarely sells dolls or toys. She has been watching a young girl named Harmony (possibly the granddaughter of the owner) come in over and over and has dreamed of being her doll. Yet when she steals Woody’s voice box and makes herself known to Harmony, she is almost immediately rejected. Seeing her so shattered, the toys opt to help her and wind up finding a loving home for her with a lost child at the carnival, finally getting the love she always craved. Congratulations, I’ve already shed a tear and the movie’s not over yet.
We still have Woody and Bonnie to deal with at this point. Woody has reconnected with his old flame, Bo Peep, who now lives as a free toy in a traveling carnival. She loves being out on her own and proves herself to be extremely clever and capable throughout the movie, with her general badass moves, her badass broken arm bandage, and her badass no-nonsense attitude. She disguises a remote controlled car to look like a skunk! Man, I wish I had heroes like her in movies back as a kid!
Needless to say, the movie offers a lot of fun. We get to see Bo in her element, we get a taste of what it’s like to be a rejected toy on meeting Duke Caboom, we see how trash can become toys with Forky, and we get to see how lost Woody gets without a kid who truly loves him. This toy, the favorite, who has become one of the least favorite, yet puts in a great deal of effort to making her happy no matter what. As the movie unravels, we find his desperation manifest - he doesn’t really know what to do without a kid. This is what Bo has left to teach him, and paired with new characters Ducky and Bunny - carnival stuffies that are joined at the paw/wing, who have been waiting a long time to be won as a prize - they find new meaning in helping pair up toys with kids, just like they did with Gabby Gabby and the lost child.
In the end, as Woody gets ready to rejoin Bonnie and the others, Buzz Lightyear tells him that “she’ll be okay.” Woody at first thinks he means Bo, but Buzz clarifies that he means Bonnie. She doesn’t need him, she never really has. Woody has a whole new life he could lead now, without being tied to one child. Here, we see Woody and Bo joyously reunite as he chooses to stay with her. Continue the waterworks because this was absolutely fantastic.
Was this movie needed? Nah, not really. A trilogy would’ve been enough. But Pixar has been dedicating a lot of time and effort into making stories that don’t simply have black-and-white angles. It’s the same reason we loved Battlestar Galactica and the first few seasons of Game of Thrones, that anyone can be the protagonist or antagonist of any given situation, based on perspective. In the end, I may have preferred to have left this series as a trilogy, simply because TS4 made me dislike Bonnie completely and created an end to the brotherhood of Woody and Buzz, but ultimately, it does seem like Woody was given a worthy story and a worthy ending, and for that, I say, “good on ya!” to Pixar.
