Toy Story War (reblog)
Dave posted this on his Tumblr:
Everyone is talking about the last Star Wars movie, a film I will probably see about two years from now (if that), and it’s preemptively disappointing to hear how the one good thing about The Last Jedi (its scorched-earth boldness re: brand hagiography) gets retconned. But there is already a Disney property that figured this out - Toy Story!
Toy Story 4 is very good as a movie, not quite as good as a movie as at least two of the other Toy Story movies. (Specifically 2 and 3 - I've now seen the first one several times because it is very much my son's speed, and I'm struck not only by how long ago 1995 was from a technology standpoint, but how long ago it was from a plotting and basic "what can you do in a children's movie" standpoint - the movie straight up cheats by the logic it established for itself to resolve its conflict, at least twice!)
But Toy Story 4 also has a throughline argument that is the most convincing I've seen in the series, and takes very seriously the problems and paradoxes that its premise introduces, and follows it to strange places. We see the birth of a toy, the nightmare of being ushered into this weird conceit, a kind of commentary on how the loose fit of analogy to reality creates a gap that you really don't want to look down into. Some folks have talked about Forky and the film more existentially, but I found that a little harder to buy into, even if it's not a huge stretch - to me it's just a kind of stubborn reminder that toys aren't actually real, more of a destabilizing of premise than trying to go all in on the analogy and imagine this has something to do with people who are actually, you know, alive. (I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's apoplectic response to A.I. because, like, robots aren't people, which is totally right, even though I think it kind of misses the point of the movie, whatever that is.)
To me it's more of a parable about creativity, characters and situations as "property" to be developed, etc. What do you do when the thing you built just doesn't really make a lot of sense anymore, and the logic that you established doesn't work - a logic that was shaky even in the initial premise (toys are real! But not exactly! Except yes exactly, and they could totally traumatize kids if they wanted to! Except lol no, they can't really do that, just kidding, forget that happened, can you imagine if we let that happen again it would be a horror movie! Also btw there is actual magic! Except no, it's not magic-magic, we still have to obey the laws of physics, that's a bridge too far!)?
What I really liked about Toy Story 4 is how ruthlessly it undermines its own logic, how Forky especially brings out the feeling you get trying to think through that logic for even a minute outside the suspension of your disbelief, but also manages, in making Forky a valuable addition to the movie, in dancing around suspension of disbelief, toying with it, and sticking the landing so that you still want to see the thing resolve. That's an incredibly difficult dance that even masters of meta ambiguity who do it on purpose mess up sometimes, so to see a Pixar movie, the first one after Disney's behemoth of behemoths status was fully secured (I once called Disney an "ever-metastasizing Death Star" and this was like a decade before they bought Star Wars!) not only broach the subject but do something interesting with it was a meta-thrill. (And again, the film's non-meta-thrills aren't quite as thrilling as the last two films.)
I haven't read as much about how (spoiler alerts!) the broader plot and resolution do more audaciously and more confidently what The Last Jedi did in the broadstrokes even though it was a bit too gummily plotted and clunky to get it across beyond conceptually. Woody just straight up abandons his life's purpose, the toy raison d'etre that motivated the action of every other film. He just leaves! And he not only leaves, but he opens up a universe in which there is a teeming subterranean world of abandoned toys who live a life of roiling conflict and earthly pleasure in a precarious nomadic existence! Like, where did that come from!
So the whole universe not only opens up, but sheds its confines completely - Toy Story is now a universe that is only about the toys, with humans as a kind of fringe aristocracy whose role seems to be to subjugate and in some cases literally imprison toys. Had it not been cheating and a conceit quickly abandoned (though flirted with a few times, like in Toy Story 4 when the non-speaker-boxed voice of a toy imitates the GPS navigation voiceover), the Sid resolution of the first film presents a bloody struggle against occasionally benevolent but more often cruel overlords that only a proletarian uprising could address, toys in guerrilla warfare against humans, perhaps a civil war of house toys against street toys.
This is not only an utterly different story but an utterly different universe than the one that the first two (and most of three) films sketch out as being possible. And I would doubt they ever follow up on any of these strands, but if you wanted to start a Toy Story extended universe, there would be worse origin stories to launch another gaggle of intellectual property extenders.
And I responded:
Dave - I'm curious. Did Peter, Paul & Mary's "Puff The Magic Dragon"* ever matter to you? It came at me as a pop song/top 40 song when I was nine, which is to say after I was too old for its plot to mean anything personal to me - so, after I'd lost any personal relationship to any of my childhood toys, teddy bears, etc. I still had elaborate fantasy narratives with toys: matchbox cars, itsy bitsy's,** etc. My friend Jimmy and I would run these fantasy plots where the toys (or matchbox car drivers) would converse with one another and engage in intricate comedic or action adventures. But these were all ad-hoc, weren't based on long-term characters or personalities we'd given to specific toys - though I do recall that when we used the itsy bitsy's I would choose a particular rubber squirrel as my lead character for which I'd do the voice and Jimmy would use a different particular itsy bitsy, a little bear or owl, I think. But it might not have the same character that it had had during a previous afternoon's play, or engage in the same type of adventure.
So "Puff" was just another story amidst the love and lost-love and surf stories and car-crash tragedies that occupied the top 40 during the first half of 1963. But I'm wondering whether, as a viewer of the Toy Stories,*** you found "Puff"'s plot echoing or informing or being informed by the movies - assuming you've heard the song in the first place.
*[I recently posted a "folky" YouTube playlist that I intend to write about someday, but "Puff" didn't make the cut - maybe, in part, because I'd first absorbed it, and PPM's "Blowing In The Wind," on the radio, prior to my conversion to folk music in the summer of 1963, but probably because the PPM track that did make it, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" (also a single but its airplay came after I'd abandoned radio, so I absorbed it as an album track, which somehow was a whole different context) strikes me, and struck me even at the time, as deeper and more emotional. If I ever become a diabolical kid-movie animator, though, maybe I'll have Puff sing "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" to Jackie!]
**[Itsy Bitsy's (or Itzy Bitzy's or -ies) were little rubber animals about an inch-and-a-half high. Jimmy had these wooden blocks with holes and connectors and axles and wheel attachments that we could build into impressive giant ramshackle vehicles. The Itsy Bitsy's would ride atop them, as their drivers/commanders. Incidentally, what I find online while searching "itsy bitsy 1960s rubber toys" are too cute to be the toys I remember; no rubber squirrel, and the bears aren't the bear or owl I remember. EDIT: Ah! When I search "itty bitty 1960s rubber toys" (not "itsy bitsy") I get them: Diener's Itty Bittys Rubber Eraser Toys - though I still don't see no squirrel. Jimmy and I called them Itsy Bitsys - a much better name - though I remember Jimmy telling me once that their official names were Itty Bittys.]
***[I've only seen the Toy Stories - the first three - as a teacher's aide in elementary-school classrooms, which means I've seen bits and pieces but never an entire movie consecutively, so in my mind their plot points and characters intermix.]
This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/375966.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.
Everyone is talking about the last Star Wars movie, a film I will probably see about two years from now (if that), and it’s preemptively disappointing to hear how the one good thing about The Last Jedi (its scorched-earth boldness re: brand hagiography) gets retconned. But there is already a Disney property that figured this out - Toy Story!
Toy Story 4 is very good as a movie, not quite as good as a movie as at least two of the other Toy Story movies. (Specifically 2 and 3 - I've now seen the first one several times because it is very much my son's speed, and I'm struck not only by how long ago 1995 was from a technology standpoint, but how long ago it was from a plotting and basic "what can you do in a children's movie" standpoint - the movie straight up cheats by the logic it established for itself to resolve its conflict, at least twice!)
But Toy Story 4 also has a throughline argument that is the most convincing I've seen in the series, and takes very seriously the problems and paradoxes that its premise introduces, and follows it to strange places. We see the birth of a toy, the nightmare of being ushered into this weird conceit, a kind of commentary on how the loose fit of analogy to reality creates a gap that you really don't want to look down into. Some folks have talked about Forky and the film more existentially, but I found that a little harder to buy into, even if it's not a huge stretch - to me it's just a kind of stubborn reminder that toys aren't actually real, more of a destabilizing of premise than trying to go all in on the analogy and imagine this has something to do with people who are actually, you know, alive. (I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's apoplectic response to A.I. because, like, robots aren't people, which is totally right, even though I think it kind of misses the point of the movie, whatever that is.)
To me it's more of a parable about creativity, characters and situations as "property" to be developed, etc. What do you do when the thing you built just doesn't really make a lot of sense anymore, and the logic that you established doesn't work - a logic that was shaky even in the initial premise (toys are real! But not exactly! Except yes exactly, and they could totally traumatize kids if they wanted to! Except lol no, they can't really do that, just kidding, forget that happened, can you imagine if we let that happen again it would be a horror movie! Also btw there is actual magic! Except no, it's not magic-magic, we still have to obey the laws of physics, that's a bridge too far!)?
What I really liked about Toy Story 4 is how ruthlessly it undermines its own logic, how Forky especially brings out the feeling you get trying to think through that logic for even a minute outside the suspension of your disbelief, but also manages, in making Forky a valuable addition to the movie, in dancing around suspension of disbelief, toying with it, and sticking the landing so that you still want to see the thing resolve. That's an incredibly difficult dance that even masters of meta ambiguity who do it on purpose mess up sometimes, so to see a Pixar movie, the first one after Disney's behemoth of behemoths status was fully secured (I once called Disney an "ever-metastasizing Death Star" and this was like a decade before they bought Star Wars!) not only broach the subject but do something interesting with it was a meta-thrill. (And again, the film's non-meta-thrills aren't quite as thrilling as the last two films.)
I haven't read as much about how (spoiler alerts!) the broader plot and resolution do more audaciously and more confidently what The Last Jedi did in the broadstrokes even though it was a bit too gummily plotted and clunky to get it across beyond conceptually. Woody just straight up abandons his life's purpose, the toy raison d'etre that motivated the action of every other film. He just leaves! And he not only leaves, but he opens up a universe in which there is a teeming subterranean world of abandoned toys who live a life of roiling conflict and earthly pleasure in a precarious nomadic existence! Like, where did that come from!
So the whole universe not only opens up, but sheds its confines completely - Toy Story is now a universe that is only about the toys, with humans as a kind of fringe aristocracy whose role seems to be to subjugate and in some cases literally imprison toys. Had it not been cheating and a conceit quickly abandoned (though flirted with a few times, like in Toy Story 4 when the non-speaker-boxed voice of a toy imitates the GPS navigation voiceover), the Sid resolution of the first film presents a bloody struggle against occasionally benevolent but more often cruel overlords that only a proletarian uprising could address, toys in guerrilla warfare against humans, perhaps a civil war of house toys against street toys.
This is not only an utterly different story but an utterly different universe than the one that the first two (and most of three) films sketch out as being possible. And I would doubt they ever follow up on any of these strands, but if you wanted to start a Toy Story extended universe, there would be worse origin stories to launch another gaggle of intellectual property extenders.
And I responded:
Dave - I'm curious. Did Peter, Paul & Mary's "Puff The Magic Dragon"* ever matter to you? It came at me as a pop song/top 40 song when I was nine, which is to say after I was too old for its plot to mean anything personal to me - so, after I'd lost any personal relationship to any of my childhood toys, teddy bears, etc. I still had elaborate fantasy narratives with toys: matchbox cars, itsy bitsy's,** etc. My friend Jimmy and I would run these fantasy plots where the toys (or matchbox car drivers) would converse with one another and engage in intricate comedic or action adventures. But these were all ad-hoc, weren't based on long-term characters or personalities we'd given to specific toys - though I do recall that when we used the itsy bitsy's I would choose a particular rubber squirrel as my lead character for which I'd do the voice and Jimmy would use a different particular itsy bitsy, a little bear or owl, I think. But it might not have the same character that it had had during a previous afternoon's play, or engage in the same type of adventure.
So "Puff" was just another story amidst the love and lost-love and surf stories and car-crash tragedies that occupied the top 40 during the first half of 1963. But I'm wondering whether, as a viewer of the Toy Stories,*** you found "Puff"'s plot echoing or informing or being informed by the movies - assuming you've heard the song in the first place.
*[I recently posted a "folky" YouTube playlist that I intend to write about someday, but "Puff" didn't make the cut - maybe, in part, because I'd first absorbed it, and PPM's "Blowing In The Wind," on the radio, prior to my conversion to folk music in the summer of 1963, but probably because the PPM track that did make it, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" (also a single but its airplay came after I'd abandoned radio, so I absorbed it as an album track, which somehow was a whole different context) strikes me, and struck me even at the time, as deeper and more emotional. If I ever become a diabolical kid-movie animator, though, maybe I'll have Puff sing "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" to Jackie!]
**[Itsy Bitsy's (or Itzy Bitzy's or -ies) were little rubber animals about an inch-and-a-half high. Jimmy had these wooden blocks with holes and connectors and axles and wheel attachments that we could build into impressive giant ramshackle vehicles. The Itsy Bitsy's would ride atop them, as their drivers/commanders. Incidentally, what I find online while searching "itsy bitsy 1960s rubber toys" are too cute to be the toys I remember; no rubber squirrel, and the bears aren't the bear or owl I remember. EDIT: Ah! When I search "itty bitty 1960s rubber toys" (not "itsy bitsy") I get them: Diener's Itty Bittys Rubber Eraser Toys - though I still don't see no squirrel. Jimmy and I called them Itsy Bitsys - a much better name - though I remember Jimmy telling me once that their official names were Itty Bittys.]
***[I've only seen the Toy Stories - the first three - as a teacher's aide in elementary-school classrooms, which means I've seen bits and pieces but never an entire movie consecutively, so in my mind their plot points and characters intermix.]
This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/375966.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.