Where do I begin. How do I even start down this road.Toy Story 4 might seem like another throwaway Pixar cash grab sequel, competent, likable, sweet but ultimately pointless. But it's so much more than that. The suspension of disbelief that the Toy Story franchise was built on takes an insane turn in the movie, one that implodes the premise into a wild series of bizarre propositions about the universe the film takes place in, questions that, to this point, the series had cleverly avoided.Well they can't avoid them anymore. Let's start simple.In Toy Story 4, we see Woody questioning his continued life and purpose as an "owned" toy. He ponders going rogue, and ultimately chooses to do so. But then...Who was Woody's owner before Andy? Who was Woody's first kid? Woody is a toy from the 1950s (TS2), so clearly he was owned by at least one kid before Andy. Does he not remember? If not, up until when does he remember? There is continuity in his conscious experience between being owned by Andy and Bonnie, so you have to wonder: up until when do toys remember things?How conscious are they? They seem completely conscious to the level of humans, but they're clearly not, because we see Forky become conscious spontaneously in the hands of Bonnie. Normally you could hand wave this question as "It's a kids' movie!", but by literally showing the phenomenon of Toy Consciousness happen on screen, the film forces bigger questions about how the universe of the movies presents the experience of "being a toy."Do toys become conscious when they're created, or when they're played with? As presented it would appear: neither? We never hear a toy talk about being at a factory. With Pappy the Prospector and the toys at Al's Toy Barn, we see that they're all conscious and aware to some degree of their wider role in the world as "toys." But they've never been played with; most of them haven't even been unwrapped.Some of the toys believe they literally are the character they represent (like Buzz), others understand themselves as kind of "tribute entities" (like Duke Kaboom), but the majority of toys appear to have personalities entirely separate from their representative physical form; Woody isn't particularly cowboyish, and has strange amnesia about his Woody's Round Up branding. Lotso Huggins Bear, Rex, Bo Peep; these are entities with personalities and ideals wholly separate from their "intended" characters.This can become incredibly bizarre when considered in the context of what we're shown. What about that chair in Bonnie's closet? It's a toy chair, but it's also alive. What possible inherent personality could a purple plastic miniature chair be assumed to have? This creature, if you can call it that, has a soul by necessity wholly disassociated from its physical form.Let's talk more about that chair, actually: we see many chairs in Toy Story, lots of furniture in fact, that does not appear to be alive or sentient. But that chair is. Why? Because it's a toy chair. What defines it as a toy chair? At a glance, the eyes and mouth being painted on.In concordance with that idea is that when Forky comes to life, it appears to be directly related to the eyes and mouth being attached to him, transforming him from a Spork into a more anthropomorphic entity.This raises some questions.First question, big question: if I, an adult, put the facsimile of eyes and a mouth on a fork in my home, would it then come to life when I was not present? Would it move around and attempt to put itself in the dishwasher or the drawer, the way Forky animates to attempt to throw himself in the trash?From the moment Forky begins to exist, all he wants is to experience "trash," his abstract concept of death. We've seen on screen what happens to trash in this world, in Toy Story 3: it gets incinerated. So is becoming conscious in this way confusing and psychologically painful for objects not originally intended as toys? As we see in the movie, inanimate objects not conceived as toys have no understanding of their wider purpose or role in the world.So let's talk about purpose.Toys talk primarily about wanting to be played with by a kid. In the first three Toy Storys, where toys are always presented alongside children, this doesn't feel strange, but in Toy Story 4, where we see Toys as independent beings living in the wild, this entire dynamic is shifted and made somewhat confusing. Why do these toys, who manifest seemingly entirely as socially and emotionally mature adults, need love from children? What practical purpose does it serve?Is the phenomenon of needing to be played with simply cultural amongst toys? Certainly we see toys in the series who have no concept of needing or even wanting to be played with by children. In the first three Toy Storys, this is a mere whimsical element, but the fourth film, with its wild toys, anarchist toys, scheming toys and Spontaneously Created toys, forces these questions.There's a moment in the first Toy Story when Woody and Sid's "Mash-Up" conglomerate toys, turn on Sid. It's a game changing moment in the film, totally unexpected, and challenges the loose ideas the audience had about the "rules of the world." These toys aren't a fantasy; this story takes place in our world, and characters who see the toys animate and come to life react to them the way someone would if it happened in real life.*Which brings us to the biggest issue that is now unavoidable after Toy Story 4: Let's discuss toys' agency, philosophy and consciousness as related specifically to Human Beings.Clearly toys are by and large benevolent, or at least benign, in their relation to humans. For unknown reasons, Toys are compelled to "freeze" and pretend to be inanimate, when around humans, but this isn't a "biological" or compulsory condition; toys have been shown to be fully capable of animating while observed by organic life forms, and Woody even comes to life in Sid's hands.This concept reaches a breaking point in Toy Story 4, which contains a scene wherein toys almost cause a major (and potentially deadly) traffic accident, and accidentally legally implicate humans for actual felonies. This, along with the idea of "wild" rogue toys, and also the notion that certain toys (like Bunny and Ducky) harbor ill-will or even violent thoughts towards humans, is a massive, insanely complicated proposition that comes with another tidal wave of questions and suppositions.Again, this might seem like overthinking, until the moment in Toy Story 4 when the toys literally hijack a vehicle and endanger their owner's life to save another toy.So, it has been set up that the concept of "pretending to be inanimate" is essentially a hustle, or perhaps something like a superstition or religious practice, easily violable should the toys so desire. What, then, is their responsibility to human beings?Let's play this out: if toys witness a child being abused, should they not interfere? What if they witness a felony, like a child being kidnapped, or a murder, or worse? Do toys feel no guilt, no shame, about not interfering? Woody felt such intense concern for Bonnie in Toy Story 4 that he willfully manipulated her experience on her first day of kindergarten. Surely, the minor unhappiness and discomfort he strived to avoid is minor in comparison to Bonnie being, say, attacked by a stray dog, or lured into a van with candy, or worse.Where, ultimately, do toys' loyalty lay if Woody can abandon Bonnie? If "wild" toys like Bo Peep come upon a serial killer who keeps people locked in a torture cabin in the woods, are they not morally obligated to somehow intercede? What if the serial killer has toys? We've seen that ideologies amongst toys vary greatly; might the serial killer's toys be complicit or even assist with the killings? Would they battle the morally upright wild toys to protect his dark secret?Is this a movie I want to see, yes, probably, but also, what the fuck?These are the scenarios that begin to cascade out of the mind-blowingly bizarre world-building choices in Toy Story 4. But honestly, we're just getting started.If toys can live in the wild, as its been established they can, what does that mean for their relationship to animals? Reliably, in Toy Story films, the toys do not "freeze up" around animals, and animals (such as the dog in TS1, the bird in TS3 and the cat in TS4) interact with the toys realistically as animals would, not understanding anything to be out of the ordinary. Is there an entire undiscovered ecosystem involving "wild" toys interacting with animals? Are toys an unseen, secret element of the animal kingdom/environment/food chain in this universe?The "hook up" culture of the wild toys at the trailer park seen in Toy Story 4 certainly doesn't seem sustainable; we've seen that animate toys are essentially 1:1 with reality. By that, I mean that they're affected by weather, and able to be captured on camera moving, talking, etc (TS3). At some point, the toys would be caught on camera; the ubiquity of cameras in the digital age certainly wouldn't help.The craziest thing about the Toy Story movies is that they do seem to have rules...that they simple refuse to explain. Which brings us around to the final question, back to the ontologically baffling nugget at the center of Toy Story 4's plot:What is a toy?...and what is an object? Like if I drew a picture of a monkey and then stuck googley eyes and a mouth to it and folded it so it was kind of like a puppet. Is that piece of paper now alive? What if you put googley eyes on a gun? Or a bomb? A tank?If by the rules of this world, there was a human corpse, and you glued googley eyes to it and drew a mouth on it and then left it in the room with a human toy...would it reanimate? If it reanimated, would it think that it was the person it was in its previous life as an organic being, or would it be a confused new sentient being? Would it think it was supposed to emulate the person it was?...in order to bring it to life...do you need a kid to play with it?The darkest image this evokes is of course a government super soldier lab, rows and rows of white rooms with glass walls with children in black jumpsuits playing with corpses to create an army of the undead. Toys running missions in Moscow. A dark lovecraftian ceremony to bring back a dead lover, lightning cracking in the sky as a man in a red robe pulls a string back on the corpse of his wife, and she lets out a "There's a Snake In My Boot" before rising shakily from the altar, human eyes glazed but googley eyes on her forehead bloodshot and looking hither and thither wildly...This is the Toy Story we have been welcomed in to by the likable but ultimately pointless Toy Story 4. A mind-bending labyrinth of un-askable questions about the nature of consciousness, and pouring out like maggots from the torn neck of roadkill, a tidal wave of horrific quandaries about the nature of existence itself.(((\FOOTNOTE: How do Sid's Toy's work? Their bodies are mixed up mutants created from pieces of old toys. Of these toys, whose consciousness did the conglomerate toys inherit? Have their souls been combined, somehow? You'd think that the soul of the toy would be in the "head," because we see that Bo Peep can reattach her arm but it doesn't function independently of her...but Mr. Potatohead's pieces can be recombined onto something else, as seen in Toy Story 3 with Mr. Tortilla Head, and remain "alive." But some toys we see don't even have heads, or faces. Hell, one of Sid's toys is literally a fishing pole with legs, but has somehow remained alive and animated? Is it in a kind of living hell? What is its awareness? Again I'd say it's "just a movie" but in Toy Story 4 we see a toy that's been torn in half; the top half is alive but the bottom half is dead.If it was stitched onto another toy, would it reanimate? Would it reanimate as a new consciousness if you put googley eyes and a mouth on it? But anyway.)))) via /r/movies https://ift.tt/2yQzFw1
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