Dammit, Pixar.
I had so much snark ready for this. So. Much. Snark. But… that’s a cute concept for Toy Story 4. That might, in fact, work. It’s goram terrifying, in the subtle ways that the Toy Story franchise keeps stubbornly insisting on being, but it might work.
You realize, of course, that Disney can now throw in all their Star Wars stuff with a straight face. Zurg vs. Vader is all I want.
The “subtle terrifying” is what keeps ‘Toy Story’ from being another ‘Land Before Time’ .. a series of films so bad parents leave the room and do not discuss…
.
Mew
It would be interesting to do a trailer for the first Toy Story as a Cronenberg-style body horror movie.
Subtle terrifying? It’s horrifically disturbing.
I mean, the whole idea of toys having consciousness but having to pretend they don’t, with multiple copies of the same personality, is the sort of thing that just makes you more uncomfortable the closer you examine it, so we alljust accept the premise and don’t dwell on it because there’s no need and the Toy Story universe is great.
But the spork in the trailer, who has been turned into a toy and desperately screams into the camera that he shouldn’t be a toy and doesn’t belong there and tries to escape? Well, that just throws the issue right in your face. Like, was he granted consciousness out of nothing when some child drew a face on him? And does this cause him to endure a seeming existence of pure anxiety? Or do all small household items have consciousness, and he’s disturbed because the essential nature of his being has been altered? What about all the paper that kids draw faces on? Are they all suffering from the same neuroses as the spork?
I don’t want to think about these things, but the desperate spork who wants no part of being a toy is the only actual story element in the trailer. What else is there to think about? No. Based on this trailer, I want no part of this dark, tortured vision.