Let’s talk about why Toy Story 4 is awesome!
The main points of this talk will be:
—Toy Story 3 had a terrible end
—feminism!
First off, TS3 relies on a lie for its happy ending. In our consumer-happy, planned-obsolescence society, most toys do not get passed down.
Have you tried giving a box of beloved, old, worn out toys to a new kid? It does not go that well. Toys are cheap relative to everything else. There’s a surplus.
So if you really love your toys and want a happy end for them… it’s not there.
Toy Story 4 turns Woody’s plight over watching Bonnie need him less & less into a powerful metaphor for parents struggling to refind their own lives as their children grow up.
This time Woody doesn’t replace one kid with another in an endless, unsustainable string.
He moves on.
But where Toy Story 4 really shines is feminism.
This is a franchise that spent three movies largely focused on and centering men. But in the fourth, that focus finally changes.
The true happy ending isn’t for Woody — it’s for Bo Peep.
We finally see what happened to Bo Peep, and she’s been doing AWESOME. She has friends and purpose and a mechanical skunk car. She’s doing fine. But yes, she wants Woody, not because she needs him. Just because she wants him.
And she gets what she wants.
I LOVE that.
Then there’s Gabby. She’s painted as a villain, an obstacle for Woody to get past. But when he actually stops to listen to her, he sees they’re the same.
Then Woody LITERALLY gives his voice to a woman to give her the chance he’s already had multiple times.
This is AWESOME.
But Gabby’s story gets even better! See, she believes that if she’s perfect enough, she’ll be loved.
So many women are sold that lie. And it is a LIE.
So it doesn’t work. Harmony rejects her, and Gabby has to find love elsewhere, but she does find it.
Woody starts Toy Story 4 talking over Dolly and breaking her rules, resentful that he’s not in the spotlight.
But by the end, he gives his voice to Gabby, his badge to Jessie, and his life to Bo Peep. He listens to those women, puts their needs over his own, and lets them lead.
I’ve loved the Toy Story franchise since… well… I saw the trailer for the first one, before it was even out. But Toy Story 4 was a balm to my soul, finally letting me find peace within a story that had previously had a way of elbowing women to the side.
And as a parent? Someone who watched the first three movies on loop when my kids were small? (They stand up better than most to that kind of brutal over-watching.) But also watched the first one as a kid myself?
I’ll be holding onto the message of Toy Story 4 for a long time.
Seeing Woody sleep beside Bonnie one last time, totally content, and then… move on to an entirely new phase in his life…
That was deeply meaningful. And it helps me move forward, as the kids I’ve built so much of my life and heart around grow away into their own lives.
Oh, and I didn’t even get into the way that the addition of Forky (and his love of trash) allows for the possibility of accepting the inevitability of death instead of endlessly, painfully striving for youthful immortality.
In Toy Story 3, the loss of youth/childhood is envisioned as a terrifying inferno.
In 4, ending up in the trash is a warm, cozy completion of Forky’s purpose. And Bo Peep keeps on living and loving her life, even as her body grows old and begins to fail.
I know which I prefer.