A movie about a fish with short-term memory loss can also be about the anxiety of parenting (Finding Nemo); a movie full of one-beat emotions and an imaginary friend named Bing Bong can also be about learning from the sadness of life and all its unmet expectations (Inside Out).
For nearly a quarter of a century, Pixar films have cornered the market on ‘kids movies that are also for adults’.
And who can forget Up’s heart-rending opening montage, which unfolds the decades shared between Carl and his dearly-departed Ellie?
Whether they feature silent robots (Wall-E) or a crime-fighting family (The Incredibles), Pixar film after Pixar film has dazzled adolescents and depressed adults.
And Toy Story started it all. So here we are, just shy of 25 years later, and a fourth iteration of Woody and Buzz has been thrust upon us. It’s a general rule that franchises yield diminishing returns, certainly beyond the friendly confines of a trilogy. And so it comes as a total surprise that Toy Story 4 is an absolute joy – equal parts funny and poignant, a welcome reunion of old friends and an introduction to new ones.
Forky
The most welcome addition is a spork named Forky (one wonders why he’s not named Sporky). The running joke with Forky is that he thinks he’s trash, and therefore seeks to hurl himself, happily, with great comedic effect, into the nearest bin – over and over and over again.
Forky’s self-understanding is forgivable. After all, the toys’ new owner, Bonnie, created him from flotsam and jetsam.
The brilliance of Forky is that he embodies the animating fear of every other toy we’ve met, Woody chief among them. He’s their constitutional opposite because he so desperately desires to be what they so desperately want to avoid at all costs: trash.
The film spends its time bringing the worldviews of Woody and Forky into harmony: the latter realises what it means to be loved by a kid and to love them back, and the former finally realises the necessity of growing up and moving on.
Genuine emotional stakes
I realise the on-the-surface inanity of the previous paragraph, but Toy Story 4 – and the entire Pixar enterprise – works so well precisely because it fills its inhuman characters with human emotion and motivation. Toy Story 4 lowers the dread-level of its predecessor – thankfully, there’s no fiery descent into a factory incinerator. But there are still genuine emotional stakes, and they coalesce into a surprising conclusion.
A valuable question hums under the surface of the film: is it better to be on your own and independent, or under the loving authority of a friend? Its answer is worth discussing.
Toy Story 4 could have easily become a tale of self-actualisation, of Woody and the gang realising they didn’t need a child to be happy. All they needed was to be free and forge their own path. But thankfully, it paves the way toward a more mature road, one already travelled by the grown-up audience that has spent so much time with these toys and their stories.
