The NeverEnding (Toy) Story
- Paulie
- Feb 26, 2023
- 8 min read
Louis and the Toy Story Industrial Complex:
It is 2007. Toy Story 3 is announced. Fans complain that it is a blatant cashgrab pointlessly extending a franchise that had had its moment.
It is 2010. Toy Story 3 releases. It makes $1 billion.
It is 2014. Toy Story 4 is announced. Fans complain that it is a blatant cashgrab pointlessly extending a franchise that had had its moment, and that it ruins a conclusive ending.
It is 2019. Toy Story 4 releases. It makes $1 billion.
It is 2023. Toy Story 5 is announced. Fans complain -
It’s all a darn spin cycle, okay? Set your watch and warrant on it.
Legacy sequels, are Hollywood’s bread and butter these days, to an almost depressing degree. You can probably pinpoint our current wave of nostalgia-bait follow-ups to old franchises to 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a pleasant movie that taught an evil lesson to Hollywood: you can retell the exact same stories as before, just with grey hair. Eight years later, fucking Michael Keaton is Batman again. It’s a bad state of affairs.
Also, they’re making Toy Story 5.
Toy Story is a truly odd franchise, for a series of films which have all been enormously successful with audiences and critics alike. The first two films, released in the early days of Pixar when it was just a spunky start-up unencumbered by corporate overlords, form a neat little duology. Then they stopped. Then eleven years passed, and Toy Story 3 was made. Nine more passed before 4. Using a rule of thumb that it takes some time from announcement to release, it’ll be seven or eight more years between 2019 and 5’s release.
Those huge gaps between 3 and 4 were part of it. Pixar made those movies with the knowledge that its audiences had gotten older, and now had nostalgia for the previous ones. In 3, Andy was suddenly college-aged. In 4, the toys were off in a new setting entirely. It’s the endings, though, that really drive home the point. In both 3 and 4, though neither were explicitly stated to be the final instalments, we’re invited to say goodbye to the toys. There’s a parting and a sense of moving on in both instalments, and that farewell between characters is unquestionably meant to be mirrored by the audience.
But then it keeps on going.
In theory, nostalgia is not an infinite battery. Our childhoods end and we get further from them every day. Growing up is about moving beyond the past, in a lot of ways. Indeed, all of that is pretty much essential to the Toy Story legacy sequel formula at this point - the idea that we have to move on. The thing is, moving on doesn’t sell any more cinema tickets or toys. Moving on is inconvenient from a business perspective. Moving on means you have to come up with something new.
So here we have it: our Toy Story cycle, the promise of an ending and then a rebirth, rinse and repeat. Nostalgia plugged and unplugged and plugged in again. An endless nostalgic playground made all the more appealing by the illusion of its temporariness. The thing is, for all the cynical analysis of capitalism I could throw at this, the miserable ideas of stunted, neverending childhoods that Disney avidly promote, this shit works. It works on me, and it probably worked on you. I have always loved these characters. I carried around a Toy Story 2 VHS everywhere I went when I was a toddler. So, regrettably, the nostalgia works. Toy Story 4 was an experience I shared with my mum and it meant a lot to me. I saw it twice. I bought Forky merchandise. As much as I hate to acknowledge it, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy just thinking of seeing those characters again.
