Toy Story 4
I’m slow. I know that because I’ve been told it my whole life. Teachers, doctors, children. As I have gotten older, I have kept to myself. There is no better way to not get told things you don’t want to hear than to live like a recluse. Which isn’t so hard to do thanks to the Internet. Except, the longer I have kept myself locked in a dark room, the more I have noticed patterns. News articles, music, reddit forums and the comment section of Pornhub. All of them are coded with secret messages directed at me. They say, “I make $95 an hour using this one simple trick,” and squirrels have more eyes than you think,” but mostly “You’re a fucking moron.”
In case you didn’t get my point, it’s that I’m slow and everyone knows it. That’s why it took me so damn long to write this review of Toy Story 4. By the way, if you didn’t get my point, then you’re probably slow too, and this web site is where slow people gather. Maybe I should stop writing reviews and turn it into a place where we can all share really stupid ideas about how dumbasses can take over the world. Pretty sure it has something to do with ketchup.
Spend too much time on the Internet and you’re going to be reminded that you’re not very good at what’s important in life. Someone else is the best in the world at flipping water bottles and having them land upright, no matter how many years you’ve been practicing. Some fat guy in a headset and cockeyed office chair is the world’s bet at bitching about his involuntary celibacy while playing World of Warcraft. I didn’t even know this was a competition, but so, so many people are vying to be champ. David Berman will always capture ennui more eloquently and heartbreakingly than the rest of us ever will.
It took a while to write this review because, first, it seemed like other people could say what I wanted better, like that six-year-old Youtube movie reviewer who scores movies on a fart-duration scale. Why the fuck didn’t I think of that? Not the farting thing, but being six. Also, I had no entry into what I wanted to say. Toy Story went down like instant oatmeal; sort of good for you, sort of sweetened, but ultimately too familiar and too mushy. It was more like the oatmeal in a cheap motel’s continental breakfast where you stuff it with as many extras as you can, like raisins, nuts and sunflower seeds, just to get your money’s worth, to feel like you’re getting revenge on the front desk clerk who yelled at you that they’re charging your credit card for all the pus stains left on the sheets.
Joke’s on them: it’s not my credit card. It’s not my pus, either.
Toy Story 4 picks up long after the first three movies. Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the others toys have been through a few owners and are now living with Bonnie, a five-year-old (Madeleine McGraw) just starting kindergarten where she creates her own friend from trash, a googly-eyed spork with pipe cleaner arms named Forky (Tony Hale).
Bonnie is so proud of her own clumsy creation that she relegates the old toys to second bananas. Most shrug it off, but not Woody. He’s like a German Shepherd; he needs a job for validation. He needs to be needed. Some of this melodrama about the bond between child and toy and the sadness of feeling unnecessary was covered in Toy Story 3. It is also covered nightly in my house when Mrs. Filthy goes out with friends without inviting me because I “embarrass her” and I “put dinner rolls in my pants and pretend I have a jumbo boner.”
Forky doesn’t consider himself a toy. He’s trash and proves it by shouting as much while hurling himself into garbage cans. That’s different than the way people around here do it; they ride around on patriotic Polaris slingshots, light off cherry bombs at midnight and tell Mexicans to go back where they came from.
There is almost a narrative in Toy Story 4 that no matter how humble your roots are, love can elevate you. Besides the good jokes about a trashy, self-loathing spork, though, love-redeems is sort of obvious. Toy Story 4 only uses it as a jumping-off point for the real theme, which is Woody learning to be a little selfish, to not live in service of, or rely on, others. Sometimes you have to acknowledge and satisfy your own wants. For him, that is the pursuit of his long-lost sweetheart Bo Peep (Annie Potts), a toy who no longer serves any child.
Bo and Woody lost touch. She’s an independent woman now. She tends to her sheep, takes care of needy GI Joe’s and rides around in a massive 4x4, which, I assume of all massive 4x4s, is a surrogate penis. She presides over a playground full of other toys who belong to no child. It’s sort of like Tinder for kids; they see a toy the like they swipe right, play with them for a while and then dump their bent, chafed bodies back into the sandbox.
That’s when the Pixar team contrives a sloppy and lazy mechanism to reunite Woody and Bonnie: Road trip! Except, it’s not a road trip as promised. Bonnie, her family, and the toys hop in a motor home and only go as far as a quaint little town with a colorful carnival and an antiques store, a town in which Bo Peep just happens to live.
Then the story splits out into a thousand other little stories. All those raisins and chocolate chips in the Super 8 oatmeal. When Forky gets lost, Woody must rescue him from a scheming baby doll (Christina Hendricks) with scowling, flop-legged ventriloquist dummies for henchmen. He is helped by a daredevil toy (Keanu Reeves) much like those piece of shit Evel Knievel stunt toys every other kid got but my parents wouldn’t buy me. Also helping at Key and Peele as stuffed animals too good to be won in the carnival, thus they are forever deprived of a child’s love.
Finally, amid the noise and clutter, the story returns to Woody and his decision to keep serving a child who no longer needs him, or to pursue love in the childless wilderness. But, it takes a while to get there and the impact is muted by how damn hard Pixar seems to be working to keep the movie entertaining.
The “road trip” premise is bewildering since the family really only sit in a crap town for most of the story. Their presence is prolonged by an unfunny gag where every time the father thinks they can leave something breaks or otherwise holds them back. The carnival itself is a gimmick, just a bunch of pretty lights and motion to let Pixar can show off its graphics and vary the backdrops. Hell, the five-year-old kid barely even gets to go to it.
The secondary toys get short shrift in the noise here. Especially Buzz Lightyear, who is reduced to a single monotonous gag about listening to his inner voice, the message of which is that your inner voice is no smarter than you are, so don’t listen. Not sure I agree because it is almost my inner voice that tells me when it’s time to take a dump. Without it, I’d be covered in even more shit.
There is some great shit in Toy Story 4. In particular, those ventriloquist dummies are creepy as fuck. The toys escape from the antique shop and the clutches of the evil baby doll is thrilling. A trash toy is a great premise, and maybe even subversive since Disney’s gonna have a fuck of a time making money selling sporks with broken popsicle sticks for feet (and yet, they’re trying). Key and Peele are funny, if their characters are just more noise.
Yet, the emotional impact of Toy Story 4 is subdued. Maybe it’s because after four of these fucking things we know the rhythm and we know when the big tug on the heartstrings is going to happen. That’s not all of it, though. The bigger problem is that Pixar is running out of BIG things to say with toys. I think they now that, even if it took them a while to figure it out. They’re probably slow just like me.
Three Fingers.