The more I think about it, the more I think Toy Story, the first 3D animated movie to hit the silver screen, was not a coincidence and actually the result of powerful market forces. And they’re not good market forces, as all of the lessons of the movie are really awful.
There’s only one significant moral in the story: there’s a right way to play with your toys, and a wrong way. The “good” child, Andy, plays with his toys the “correct,” safe, non-destructive way. The “bad” child, Sid, plays rough with his toys, damaging and breaking them. Worse still, he takes them apart and reassembles them into strange creatures he came up with in his imagination. By portraying children’s playthings as literal living, sentient beings, Toy Story teaches, quite emphatically, that all forms of destructive play are evil. Taking apart your dolls and mixing their bodyparts for fun is literally the same as torturing small animals who can talk.
Consider the contrasting ways the two children are introduced. Andy is introduced first, which is important in any propaganda because the target audience must first be shown the “right” way to do something, then will reflexively dislike anything that contradicts that first “right” way. He sets up his toys in a Wild West™ scenario that on some surface level can be considered “creative” but really isn’t. It’s an extremely scripted, adult-like play routine. Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes with an actual child knows that’s not how they naturally play. Also, very importantly, Andy is playing in an orderly, indoors environment that’s sanitary like a COVID isolation ward.
Then, and only then, are we exposed to Sid, the bad kid. First off, he’s playing outside. That’s red flag #1. Secondly, he’s playing in a very disorderly and violent way. With the subtlety of a brick to the face, Toy Story’s script writers introduce Sid in a war scene, committing a war crime. He’s conscripted his toys into opposing armies in a make-believe war involving rocks and dirt. After one of these armies has been defeated, Sid straps a firecracker to a surviving plastic soldier and explodes him. Meanwhile, Andy’s toys watch the atrocity from the bedroom window, powerless to do anything about it. Indeed, take a moment to contemplate just how terrifying Sid’s play would seem to a toy. At least when a child scratches his knee, or even breaks a bone, he’ll heal eventually. But when a toy is scratched or damaged, he’s mutilated forever.
Buzz Lightyear, the new toy, is so shocked and disgusted by Sid’s brutal Gestapo-like murder of one of his fellow toys, he jumps up on the windowsill to attempt a rescue, but the other toys stop him. Indeed, Buzz Lightyear is Anne Frank™. He’s forced to watch the brutal extermination of his people, and powerless to do anything about it. It is no exaggeration to say that in the Toy Story universe, Sid is literally like Hitler™. He’s an evil psychopath who tortures and murders innocent toys for fun.
If you think I’m being ridiculous or reading too much into it, let me ask you this. Why was Sid playing war, while Andy was playing peace? Why not reverse it and have Andy playing war with his toys? Because of course, war is inherently violent and bad. Andy is good, Sid is bad, and that’s why their respective make-believe games are framed the way they are. There’s no more effective way to portray Sid as a bad murderer than portray him playing war and killing his toys.
In the second play scene with Sid, he steals his sister’s doll and swaps its head with a toy dinosaur. Again, this is classic propaganda. Playing rough with your own toys isn’t inherently bad, but it is bad to steal and break your little sister’s toys. Toy Story’s plot cleverly conflates these two completely unrelated acts together into one crime. Then, drives home the message with a horrifying torture scene of Sid sawing off the heads of helpless living creatures.
Context provided by on-screen characters is crucial. In a fictional universe, it can be unclear to the audience what the rules are, especially if it’s very different from our own. Imagine if an alien landed on Earth. He might not understand why it’s bad to spit in people’s faces. On his planet, that might be a normal way to greet someone. In fiction, protagonists and related sympathetic characters provide much needed context. If the protagonist is upset, the audience can infer that this is a bad thing. So when Sid breaks his toys, the audience might not have enough context to immediately understand this is a bad thing. But when Buzz and Woody watch Sid breaking his toys with horrified looks on their faces like they’re witnessing nazi surgical experiments in a concentration camp, we as the movie audience can conclude that being rough with your toys is literally like torturing living people.
Now for the obvious question, why? If Toy Story is corporate propaganda, what’s the point of it? Well, I have an idea.
A child like Sid is very easily entertained, therefore, not a good consumer. See, when Sid gets bored with one of his toys, he breaks it and builds new toys, or, he straps the toy to a rocket and explodes it for fun. Even if Sid didn’t have any toys, he could still have fun with sticks and rocks. Worst. Consumer. Ever.
The ideal child is Andy, who only plays with his toys the correct way. And it’s no coincidence that this correct way inherently means continually buying more toys. I cannot say this enough, Toy Story has the subtlety of a brick when you really start looking at it for corporate messaging. At the beginning of the movie, Andy, the consumer, is happy with his toy cowboy, and all of his play is oriented around cowboys. But then for his birthday he gets a toy spaceman, and that changes everything. He abandons all of his old play routines, and the toys associated with them. He even stops wearing his signature cowboy hat. All of his new games are about Buzz Lightyear the space man, which requires buying more toys and accessories. It even requires buying new wall posters and bed sheets. He didn’t just get a toy, he got a whole new lifestyle.
Let’s look back at Sid. No really, look at Sid and remember that he’s Andy’s neighbor. They likely go to the same school, see the same TV shows, and see all the same marketing and advertising. But they reacted completely differently. When Woody and Buzz Lightyear get lost, and found by Sid, he immediately recognizes Buzz. After all, he’s seen the same toy commercials as Andy. But his excitement doesn’t go beyond that. He just incorporates them into the same war games he was already playing. And (here’s the crime) he doesn’t go to his parents and beg for new accessories, posters, and bed sheets.
Yes, it’s true that children acquire different tastes as they grow. But were these tastes they acquired themselves, or ideas planted in their heads by external stimulation? It’s also no coincidence that Sid’s family is portrayed as poor and trashy, while Andy’s family is comfortably middle class, despite the absence of a father figure (take that, patriarchy).
To recap:
Good children playing with a toy correctly: indoors, sanitary, orderly, careful, scripted games monitored by external authority figures and approved by the toy’s corporation.
Bad children playing with a toy incorrectly: outdoors, dirty, loud, chaotic, destructive, unsupervised, unapproved by the toy’s corporation.
Now what were the long-term effects of the Toy Story franchise, which is now (I think) four movies, not even counting spin-off products like at least two different Buzz Lightyear films. The humans who were children when the first movie came out are now adults, and one or two more generations of kids have been introduced to the franchise since then. Who does the ideal 21st Century child more closely resemble, Andy or Sid? Really, the only crime Andy committed in the whole movie was playing alone without wearing a mask.
Ian Kummer
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Good point, I’ve always said that childhood has become an industry based on a wrong assumption that childhood should be sheer pleasure and continuous supply of joy. Actually, kids like puppies and kittens learn through playing, that’s the purpose, not raising dumb consumers.
Another important thing is that a kid is supposed to very early grasp the distinction between living creatures like dogs and cats who require love and care, and objects that can be explored without any risk
This is something I’ve been thinking quite a bit in the past few years, because I know for a fact I felt the effects of this sort of messaging myself. The near-endless wave of “for kids” stories that give nonsentient objects and animals human-level sapience and intelligence has directly contributed to the current youth and adult generations putting way too much importance into objects and simple creatures. Too much humanization of them ended up getting growing kids used to treating everything from toys to personal possessions to regular animals as if they were people, and deserved the same kind of attention and respect and PERSONHOOD. Hence why the current generations feature much higher proportions of people overly obsessed with their material possessions, becoming “fur daddies/mommies” acting as if household pets are on the same level as children (and indeed treating them as full-fledged replacements of children!), and of course, going far overboard with ideas about animal protection or abuse, unreservedly seeing them as possessing human-level thoughts and feelings and rights.
Some might scoff at you for reading into it more in-depth, but I feel it’s right to do so, because, yeah, that DOES sail right past one’s logical filters (if one even has them if they watch movies when little), and ends up rubbing off on the psyche. Those not overtly stated, but inherently implied elements of the very structure of the story and its aspects deliver the real payload, the one that the brain doesn’t fixate upon and kind of passively absorbs as associations and “if – then” pairs.
I recall seeing, many years ago, a pretty insightful look into Wreck-It Ralph and just how much of it served to subconsciously deliver some thought patterns in much the same way. Specifically, the poster brought up how much of it communicates the same ideas that basically became foundational for modern Hollyweird and adjacent industries – that the prior generations are wrong and evil and must be disobeyed, and always act out of malice and negative motivations, as well as the negation of “traditional” everything in favour of “breaking the system” to reveal a supposedly-intended-all-along more perfect state of being that had been corrupted by those evil adults who tell you what to do. Entirely unsubtly even, if you think of it – the concepts there tell of an “evil” structured system of traditional order in which everyone is unhappy, and a “good” state of affairs that only comes by through tearing it down and installing the most chaotic and “oppressed” elements into power, who then turn out to be the true intended rulers all along. (Ralph himself helps sneak that in better, too – since he doesn’t upend the order of his native game, but the story truly centers on Vanellope instead, to whom he is merely an enabler and a vehicle; you could say he’s the desired image of an obedient cuck man happy to take hits for everything and finding his purpose in lifting up and empowering an “oppressed alternative girl”.) All of that sailing along into a mind on the back of a supposedly innocuous and visually engaging story of a couple misfits.
Wreck-it-Ralh is actually another movie I have been thinking about this week and want to review, though my take is a little different. Ralph is portrayed as foolish and childish for being unhappy with his lot in life and wanting to improve it. In the end, he’s in the same situation with no improvements and he’s just learned to accept it. And the elites in his game make no effort or even consider the idea of making acomodations for him. There’s literally a magic hammer, for God’s sake. They could build him a room in the mansion with no effort at all. Aside from being incredibly classist, I can’t help but thinking there’s some weird racial phrenology undertone here, that the “gorilla-like” people are clumsy and dangerous in polite society and need to be kept outside in the dog house.
Vanellope, on the other hand, is literally a princess. The dictator she overthrows, as it turns out, is a usurper, a nobody who stole her rightful place for himself. That really seems like some sort of Anastasia parable, an anti-bolshevik fantasy about a princess who overthrows the scheming commies. Maybe not anti-communism exactly (since the usurper is a monarch too) – but more of a story about a successful peasant revolt that puts an illegitimate ruler on the thrown, but is then toppled by the rightful heir.
Overall, it’s a very backwards story from a studio that claims to be progressive and liberal.
Anything with Sarah Silverman in it gives me goose bumps.
Yeah, that’s a good summation of his role. It basically says “you dumb oafish male peasant, stay in the doghouse and be happy someone Actually Deserving has been installed in her rightful place”. A weirdly monarchical feel at first blush, but when you consider “woke”, especially rad-feminist noise about how men must be pushed down and kept as obedient servants constrained by “woke” principles, it doesn’t seem as surprising.
Turbo the villain guy being a main character of another game also lends it the air of a two-party system contest where “the opposing candidate” is pure evil and the “protagonist” candidate is pure good. A useful principle to instill in kids in the American double-headed hydra party system, helps them get to hate the opposing party candidates by instinct and keep the system smoothly rolling along.
Sam! You mean Sam.
Great catch, I can’t believe I missed this
Kids’ days are full of fears, terror, dark thoughts, accidents/injuries, omens, uncontrollable impulses like desire, jealousy, aggression, revenge.
Not just innocent happy play, comfort, fun, love, and niceness. The average adult could not cope with the roller coaster of emotions a child is often subject to in the course of a typical day. Our image of happy childhood is largely contrived, and based on the notion of playing at whatever you fancy instead of working for a boss — the latter is largely true.
I actually have a personal memory of a toy. It was a soft rubber molded tractor, with two wheels stuck to a metal axle so they could turn, about 8 cm long, and a driver sitting on the seat. I used to chew on it while falling asleep (2-3 years old). One day I chewed off the head of the driver, by accident.
I was sure I had done something unforgivably terrible, felt guilty, and thought my crime would catch up with me.
Have to admit, when I watched it for the first time all those years ago, I didn’t notice this subtext. My attention was on the Buzz-Woody rivalry and Andy’s toys seeing the latter as a villain (due to a misunderstanding, funnily enough).
But yes, now that you mention it, the early parts of the film seem extremely sanitised. My childhood wasn’t like that at all.
Because the subtext doesn’t exist. Kummer is pulling it out of his ass. Sid is bad because he’s a violent asshole who destroys not only his but other people’s property for fun. A kid who literally blows up toys would be a bit weird at the best of times, but it becomes especially horrible in a fictional world where the toys are literally alive. Of course we don’t live in that world, but there really is such a thing as overanalyzing something. Within the context of the story Sid is literally murdering people for fun. That’s it. It’s not meant to be a deep piece of subliminal corporate propaganda or whatever.
This goofy article probably has more (mis)thought put into than the actual plot of Toy Story. Sometimes the depth simply isn’t there to be analyzed.
Ian, could you do a review of the old Walt Disney movie Pinocchio? I’d like to get your perspective on that one. I saw it when I was almost eight years old and I still think about it 69.
I have taken my two girls to see some Disney movies like The Incredibles and others. There’s adult humor in them over the kid’s heads.
Toy Story and marketing is typical. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles generated a fortune in products every kid’s movie does.l
Hmm, yes, but I’ll have to watch it again and think it over 🙂
That’s a very imaginative critique of Toy Story, but you are wrong. Sid is a bad kid because he is _destroying_ his toys, and other kid’s toys. Toys are created with a purpose. Good kids repurpose _broken_ toys. They don’t take new toys and rip them apart and set fire to them. The conceit of the film is that toys are alive and have souls that are connected to the intent of their creator for the purpose of making children happy. Sid is a mean, nasty and unhappy child. The toys only want to make him happy and he attacks them. That was why the toys were horrified by what they saw him do.
It’s not consumeristic or whatever for kids to not immediately rip up and abuse the toys their parents buy them. That’s why Erector Sets, Legos, Duplo, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, etc etc exist.