Toy Story 4
Jul. 4th, 2019 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraToy Story 4 was enjoyable, overall; some good animation, made me genuinely laugh a few times, female characters in multiple significant and supporting roles (which is not a guarantee with Pixar, why is their next thing a Tom Holland-Chris Pratt brother buddy comedy), certainly better than Secret Life of Pets 2 which I also took the kids to recently. But I liked where 3 ended it better. I'll put the rest of my thoughts behind a cut, for easier avoidance of my relentless negativity.
Boy, there's really no such thing as a happy ending without compulsory heterosexuality, is there. The end of 3 is such a great found-family story - the way they all take hands in the incinerator, the miracle survival because of an unexpected family bond someone formed earlier, the way they're all together and in fulfilling roles, I just have a lot of feelings about it. And to instead give us a permanent parting so that Woody can go off in a romantic pairing, meh. I mean, I don't know, I actually am very interested in the whole "what do you do with the next stage of your life/with the later stages of your life, when you may be slowing down/obsolescent/etc" question. And I like that Woody transitions from a leadership/starring role to a teaching and supporting role! I like that he has to ask himself that question, who is he *now*, has to figure out how to keep living a meaningful life after all those previous big events are in the past. I just wish the answer wasn't always The Love Of A Good Woman.
Also, I didn't like the handling of the "Gabby needs a voice box to be loved" plot; felt like there was some unexamined ableism there. Like, I thought that was going to end up going in more of a direction of "Forky teaches Gabby that "broken" and "trash" are just labels and what matters is being present and that your friends will help believe in you when it's hard to believe in yourself", but, nope, jealous disabled villain literally steals an abled person's body part (or I guess pressures/coerces them into giving it up, but either way, the disabled are clearly parasites on the abled here) and is only able to be redeemed and do good once their disability is "corrected". Ew. My impression is that speech disorders can cause a lot of shame for the people who have them, or maybe more accurately that there's a lot of shamING directed at the people who have them, so why not give kids a story where Gabby gets some support in talking back to the ableism she's internalized? There was a Dear Sugar column that's always stayed with me, You have arrived at the fire, where she's answering a person who is deeply ashamed of their stutter. I wish the writers of this movie could have read it.
Boy, there's really no such thing as a happy ending without compulsory heterosexuality, is there. The end of 3 is such a great found-family story - the way they all take hands in the incinerator, the miracle survival because of an unexpected family bond someone formed earlier, the way they're all together and in fulfilling roles, I just have a lot of feelings about it. And to instead give us a permanent parting so that Woody can go off in a romantic pairing, meh. I mean, I don't know, I actually am very interested in the whole "what do you do with the next stage of your life/with the later stages of your life, when you may be slowing down/obsolescent/etc" question. And I like that Woody transitions from a leadership/starring role to a teaching and supporting role! I like that he has to ask himself that question, who is he *now*, has to figure out how to keep living a meaningful life after all those previous big events are in the past. I just wish the answer wasn't always The Love Of A Good Woman.
Also, I didn't like the handling of the "Gabby needs a voice box to be loved" plot; felt like there was some unexamined ableism there. Like, I thought that was going to end up going in more of a direction of "Forky teaches Gabby that "broken" and "trash" are just labels and what matters is being present and that your friends will help believe in you when it's hard to believe in yourself", but, nope, jealous disabled villain literally steals an abled person's body part (or I guess pressures/coerces them into giving it up, but either way, the disabled are clearly parasites on the abled here) and is only able to be redeemed and do good once their disability is "corrected". Ew. My impression is that speech disorders can cause a lot of shame for the people who have them, or maybe more accurately that there's a lot of shamING directed at the people who have them, so why not give kids a story where Gabby gets some support in talking back to the ableism she's internalized? There was a Dear Sugar column that's always stayed with me, You have arrived at the fire, where she's answering a person who is deeply ashamed of their stutter. I wish the writers of this movie could have read it.
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Date: 2019-07-05 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-06 02:12 am (UTC)