Narrative Analysis: Toy Story 4 – Woody Finally Gets Lost (condolences to Buzz Lightyear)

Can we talk about Toy Story 4?  I highly recommend watching it if you haven’t seen it yet.  Excellent writing, and it is a visual playground.  If you’re into narrative analysis, then it’s an even better idea to go watch it, because that movie is insane, and this should explain why.

So, if you’ve seen it, or haven’t and also don’t care about spoilers, then you’re gonna want to put on your walkin’ shoes.

I do recommend seeing it though. It also has probably the funniest joke in cinema because of the sound effect used in it.  I’ll let you guess which one.

This deconstruction covers the characters Forky, Gabby, Buzz, and Woody, in each of their own sections. I tried to make each section stand alone, but this whole thing is ordered in kind-of-chronological order, so one section might depend on info from one before it. Maybe. I’m not sure. Probably.

This is written as if you haven’t seen any of the movies.  Thankfully, Toy Story 4 pretty well stands on its own. There will be a few small details from the previous ones we’ll cover, but they are few and are small.

Shoed up?  Let’s go.

Forky’s Birth

One thing the Toy Story series hadn’t yet covered is how or when a toy first comes to life.  They cover that topic a bit here in TS4, but through not-so-subtle metaphor.  The little girl who owns the toys, Bonnie, she has to go to kindergarten orientation.  She makes a toy out of some pipe cleaner, play-doh, a popsicle stick, and a spork.  It’s a walking spork with play-doh for eyebrows and mouth, and googly eyes for… eyes.  Attached with more play-doh to the bottom of the handle are two halves of a popsicle stick for feet.  He has a pipe cleaner twisted around for arms and hands.  … just google it.  It’s so hard to describe.  It’s what you think a toddler would make.

Woody, the main character and one of Bonnie’s toys, is in her backpack with Forky (she names him Forky, btw) and to Woody, Forky is just a spork that hasn’t said or done anything.  Then Forky gasps his first breath of life and Woody freaks. tf. out.  It’s pretty great.  Woody apparently didn’t know how this worked either.

Bonnie comes home, tosses her backpack into the bedroom and runs off.  Woody crawls out of the backpack to tell all the other toys she had a great first day at kindergarten, and that she made a friend.  They’re all “Oh, that’s nice, she’s already making friends.” and he’s all “Uh, no, she literally made a friend.

Woody kneels down, pulls a bit of the backpack flap up, and Forky’s trembling hand comes up and grasps the zipper lining, he slowly pulls his head up from inside to look out.  Woody then gently helps Forky out by cradling Forky’s head and pulling Forky out of the unzipped backpack.  The flaps are separated barely enough for Forky to slip between.  Woody cradles all of Forky, carries him over to the group and sets him on his feet and introduces him to everyone.

Forky barely understands reality, as one might reasonably expect of a newborn spork.  Woody introduces the group to Forky, and Forky, standing there, expressionless, a spork with a play-doh face and crooked pipe cleaner arms, his first word to fill the silence is

“Trash.”

Woody tells him that he’s a toy, and that they’re all toys.  Forky tries to integrate the concept as he tries to simply say the word ‘toy.’  “Toh… Tooooooo-trash.”  and fails (I can’t not belly laugh every single time).  Woody says again that he’s a toy, and Forky says “Trash” again, sees a wastebasket near Bonnie’s bed, and sprints towards it.

Forky literally runs as best his infant popsicle sticks can towards a wastebasket as if his life depended on it.

So we see a toy be born, about as literally as possible.  Interpretations of Forky are going to vary by a lot, influenced heavily by how you interpret the ‘trash’ metaphor.  Does the trash represent some kind of rejection, some perceived low rank in society, some indication of low self-esteem (for whatever reason), or lack of belonging, or something else negative?  Does trash represent the end of things, or simply a different state?  Is it even bad?  Well, it’s ‘trash.’  Dealer’s choice.

“It doesn’t have to be bad,” someone might say.  “‘One person’s trash is another person’s treasure,’ right?”  Which the movie does not utter at all.

This becomes a problem for me pretty quickly.  Forky matures mentally very, very quickly in the movie (thank God) but almost the entire time, fully sentient, he’s bookin’ it for the nearest waste bin.  No lie.  There’s a whole montage about Woody trying to stop all the ways Forky tries to literally hop into a various, gross, buckets.  The montage sings a jaunty tune about how Randy Newman “can’t watch you throw yourself away.”  And it’s like… guys… ladies… all y’all who made this, got something on your mind?  Wanna talk about it?  Maybe you’ve come to terms with whatever all of that is that you got going on there, which is reasonable to presume since it’s presented in such a thoroughly light-hearted manner (one of Pixar’s most astounding tricks it deftly performs over and over is wrapping otherwise reprehensible or disgusting concepts in such comforting giftwrap that we are actually drawn to it).  If you have come to terms, please share your secrets.

Eventually, and maybe something that should’ve happened sooner, Forky does articulate what the trash means to him, though, and it redeems the concept.  To him, it’s home.  It’s warm, it’s cozy, he just wants to be there.  It’s where he feels he belongs.  It’s sold as positive, and it was so… buy’able?  He shares his perspective in a long scene between him and Woody where the two have a long time to do some real bonding, and it’s a critical, load-bearing scene for the entire movie.

Woody spends a not-insignificant amount of the first half of the movie trying to convince Forky that he’s a toy, not trash, and he should stick around.  Woody tries to find every single angle and viewpoint and perspective, and he finally finds one, immediately after Forky says what the trash means to him.  Woody successfully convinces Forky to stick around as a toy by telling Forky that Forky is Bonnie’s trash.  Forky empathizes immediately and realizes his importance to Bonnie (he is indeed objectively important to her), and wants to be there for Bonnie instead of hitching a ride with Waste Management.

Forky’s perspective of trash helps Woody find the perspective Forky could actually understand, and it came from Forky himself.  From that, Woody could finally construct a relatable analogy for him.

Woody’s discovery of that relatable analogy is also quite significant, and we’ll come back to it.  It is the excuse for all of the creepiness to come.

Gabby’s Psychopathy

Woody and Forky eventually find themselves in an old antique store, and they hide from what they think are people walking through one of the aisles.  Turns out it was just one of those 1930’s style ventriloquist dummies (NOPE. I’M OUT.  MOVIE OVER), and it was pushing a baby buggy because, you know, that’s normal.  The dummy discovers Woody and Forky, and Woody apologizes for interrupting.  Suddenly, from inside the carriage sits up a doll that goes “No, it’s quite alright!  We were just on our morning stroll!”  The doll is one of those 1940’s’ish dolls named Gabby Gabby, with the bobbly eyes and stiff posture of the arms and legs.  She has a pull-string voice box, just like Woody does, but obviously with a record of her own voice and sayings.  She spots his string off the mirrored finish of a silver dining platter behind Woody and proceeds to chat up him and Forky.  She says to hop in, and her dummy picks them up and throws them in, to the point where she had to tell the dummy to be careful with their guests.  It comes out that she has a voice box, it’s broken, oh look Woody has a voice box!  And now she wants it.

Woody says he and Forky have to go, she says they should stay, he insists on leaving, she insists on them staying, and her dummy goons walk closer to the sides of the buggy.  There’s four of them now.  She says “You can’t go.  You have what I need.  Right.  In.  There.” and as she talks, we see Woody from her very eyes, and we see her hand as she points directly.  at.  his.  Chest.

She might also want his liver.  As in, Woody-wakes-up-in-a-bathtub-full-of-ice-with-some-new-stitches liver.

A funny thing about this entire series is that the body of a toy is not terribly sacred.  When they’re being played with, they’re thrown at walls, left in storms, forgotten and replaced almost as quickly, body parts removed, replaced, broken, written on, scratched, torn, or shattered.  In Toy Story 4, it’s literally one of the jokes.  In 3 of the 4 Toy Story movies, a character loses an arm.  No lie.  An arm.  Snapped clean off.  It’s what rattles Buzz into self-awareness in Toy Story 1.  Woody in Toy Story 2 loses his mind when a seam pops and his arm eventually falls off.  In Toy Story 4, Bo Peep reaches down to help hoist Woody back on his feet, and the weight of him snaps her arm off at the bicep.  Woody and Bo freak out, but Bo was only joke-freaking and turns to laughing and just bandages it back up with tape.

While not an arm, it deserves honorable mention that in Toy Story 3, Mrs. Potato Head loses and leaves behind one of her eyes in Andy’s room, and Mr. Potato Head temporarily becomes Mr. Tortilla Head.  So, yeah, very little corporeal sanctity.

Not to mention the psychologists’ wet dream waking nightmare of Franken-toys that was Sid’s room in Toy Story 1. brrbbrbbrrbrbrl.  No thank you.

So when this scene comes along with Gabby practically shoving at Woody a mimosa that’s totally not laced with Special K, maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising?  The way the movie sold those other problems, it was subconsciously excusable.  It was a consequence of their nature, nothing that couldn’t be overcome, everyone eventually gets fixed, and it was never gruesome.  Therefore it was, by simply accepting the nature of toys, imbued with a higher degree of acceptability.  Lost an arm?  Literally?  Happens all the time.  Literally.  Here’s some tape.  Literally.

But this continually surprised me, and it kept getting worse.  Woody refuses to give up his voice box, Gabby takes Forky hostage, forcing Woody to escape without Forky.  During the escape, her main goon tries to literally rip out Woody’s voice box through a tear in Woody’s back.  Then he straddles Woody as Woody lay face down, and her henchman starts digging around fluff like a transplant surgeon raging on PCP.  Like, I was shocked to see this.  This is where, on my first viewing, I stopped the movie, only to finish it months later.

The dummies manage to apprehend Forky, but Woody escapes.  He didn’t want to leave Forky behind but didn’t have much choice.  He tried to get him back, but just couldn’t.

So Woody escapes. Meanwhile, back at the ranch antique shop, Gabby strikes up conversation with Forky, and Forky, oblivious to the fact that he’s captive, happily tells Gabby all about Woody.

This is where that bonding scene has its payoff.

When Woody returns to save Forky, she ends up convincing Woody to give up his voice box.  She says everything Woody said to Forky, because Forky happily told her, about how noble it is to be there for a child, that it’s the only reason to exist as a toy, and that it is simply their purpose.  She says that being a toy sounds amazing, and asks him if it is what it’s cracked up to be.  Woody says it is.  She says she’d give up anything to have just one of those moments.

All Woody could say was “Just leave me Forky.”

She says “Of course.”

And her goons escort him to what is presumed to be an operating theater because the next shot is of Woody WAKING UP ALL GROGGY FROM UNDERNEATH A SEWING MACHINE AND BRIGHT LIGHTS BECAUSE HE JUST “DONATED” HIS LIVER VOICE BOX.  I have no idea what anaesthetic they used to put Woody under, if any, but I also am way too scared to ask because we have already seen that they have no problem trying to STEAL PEOPLE’S LIVERS.

Gabby sports her new voice box as she drops Forky off in her buggy.  As he hops out to meet Woody, she says to Forky, “I’ll miss you, my little utensil.”

Again, what she said was “I’ll miss you, my little utensil.”

Do you see?  Do you see it now?  Slight rephrasing:

“I’ll miss you, my little tool.”

“I’ll miss you, my little instrument of manipulation.”

Yeah, he is a utensil. It’s a cute joke. He was also used as one. Now it’s disturbing.

She says she’ll miss her device.  Without Forky, she may not have figured out in time how to manipulate Woody into giving up his voice box.  Her insanity was understandable if not forgivable up to this point because, just like humans, she may not have been fully aware of her actions.  No longer.  This line could not be more disturbing as it demonstrates that she is fully self-aware and cements a diagnosis of sociopath.

Oh, but then the voice box didn’t help Gabby find an owner and at the first rejection she’s all sad and wants to give it back and is like seriously sad and ‘nobody wants me my life is terrible boo hoo.’

Thank God it wasn’t an actual liver of an actual person.  “Oh, alcohol doesn’t actually get me drunk.  Take your liver back.  I don’t need it anymore.”  WHAT

Gabby does actually say “I don’t need it anymore.”  Like, are you serious?  That’s what half this movie was about.  He donates an organ and after one drink does nothing, she suddenly wants to give it back.  She’s not a toy.  She’s bananas.  This was made excusable, once again, due to the franchise’s reliance on the physical reparability of toys, and, more importantly, Woody similarly finding an angle to convince Forky to do what Woody wants.  The technique was initially whitewashed because the protagonist uses it.  It is then excusable for the antagonist to use the same technique, to use Woody’s perspectives to paint a selfish goal as altruistic, dutiful, noble, and soul-fulfilling.

There’s a dissonance there though because every time someone gets broken, everyone freaks out.  But when Gabby’s gut-raking goons get into Woody’s stuffing, he doesn’t seem to make a big deal of it even though what happens to him is about the most horrific bodily destruction in the entire series.  If it’s so easy and commonplace, wouldn’t it eventually sink in as nbd?  There is one exception, one instance that is nbd, which we’ll get to in a bit.

The only reason I can think of for not expressing, proportionally, Woody’s liver being brutally almost-stolen is that they just couldn’t go there.  This is a kids’ movie.  We gotta cap it somewhere.  This is probably as good a place as any.  If I were in the writers’ room, I’d also reject a pitch of this scene where Woody goes comatose because he scored his pain a 113 out of 10.

Woody’s Lesson

Woody has some issues.  Woody has a lot of issues.  Mostly issues around his authority, his identity, and everyone doing what he says, when he says it.  Woody adopts a rigid adherence to his purpose and, more frustrating, he dictatorially imposing his purpose onto literally every other toy he meets and demands conformance.  Buzz in TS1, the entire Roundup Gang in TS2, him totally peacing out from the daycare in TS3 even though nobody else wanted to go with him.  When he’s not number one, it really knots his pull string.

Bo Peep is the real hero of the movie.  She embraces life at every turn.  She accepts being sold in the beginning, she accepted her evolving role with her new kid.  She did choose to become a lost toy instead of sit in a toy shop, but she very clearly adapted to being a lost toy, and by the time Woody meets her, she had already not just accepted that life, but had fully embraced it.  This is explicit; she asks Woody if he’s a lost toy, and he confirms, to which she says “That’s great!”  They actually ask and answer each other at the same time, she accepts his new life with “That’s great [that you’re a lost toy]!” and Woody says to her “That’s awful [that you’re a lost toy]!”

She teaches this indirectly and unintentionally to Woody when she convinces Duke Caboom to help them by jumping a gap in the antique store.  Real quick:  Duke Caboom is a hokey motorcycle-riding thoroughly-Canadian stunt devil toy.  Bo says to him, “Right now, we need the only toy who can crash us onto Gabby’s cabinet. …Any Duke Caboom toy can land, but you are the only one that can crash the way ya do. …Forget Rijan [the French kid who owned and then instantly discarded you], forget the commercial [that unrealistically hyped your capabilities and fun-causing]!  Be the Duke you are right now: the one who jumps and CRASHES!”

Duke, shocked at the revelation, speaks the lesson out loud, a bit like a caveman:  “Be.  Who I am.  Right now.”  Bo proceeds to rally his spirit by rattling off what are probably Duke’s slogans.  “Who’s the Canuck with all the luck? …Who’s the greatest of the Great White North? …WHO’S THE MOST SPECTACULAR DAREDEVIL CANADA HAS EVER SEEN?!”  She really crescendos there with the enthusiastic encouragement.

This entire scene, Woody only watches.  He has only two lines, one of them being “Crash?”.  The entire conversation is Bo encouraging Duke to live the life he’s been given.  If you watch with commentary, Woody’s education was deliberate to the point where they say that he was supposed to just watch, to see Bo, as Pixar puts it, “just taking charge here and able to turn Duke from just crying like a baby to, back into having the confidence to just be who he is and, and just own that.  Watch this scene, it is about Bo and Duke, but Woody is constantly watching what’s going on here and he’s taking notes…”  The film’s commentary goes on to say this device is used to set up Woody’s rallying speech to Duke so he would attempt a second jump in the third act.

I’d argue that the lesson the director intended was actually secondary to a much larger schooling. Woody also learns and adopts the perspective for himself that Bo has about acceptance, and he does this while watching her communicate it to someone who also isn’t accepting of their circumstances.  In this way, Duke becomes a proxy for Woody, and, through Duke, Woody finally gets it.  Because his ex finally got through to him about his dumb nonsense.  It always takes an ex, amirite?

Back to Bo.  She has accepted her life so thoroughly that she, by telling Duke to be himself, teaches Woody the lesson he hasn’t been able to learn across the entirety of the first three films:  embrace life, not just duty.  Help others embrace their lives, too.  Embrace life as the second-favorite toy in Toy Story 1.  Let Buzz be Buzz until he figures it out for himself (which Buzz does through the natural course of time).  Even though Woody was embracing life as an attic toy in Toy Story 2, life had other plans.  Life tossed him, via accident, into that yard sale, so it wanted him to embrace life as a museum piece.  Life even tried to force him into acceptance, Woody needed to learn the lesson that badly.  In Toy Story 3, he was asked again to embrace life, this time as a daycare toy, but he noped out of there pretty hard, too.

That’s the fascinating thing about the Toy Story series thus far.  The main character refused to grow, and his stagnation was justified or excused every. single. freaking. time.

You could argue that every Toy Story movie ends happily when/because Woody accepts a facet of life.  He does when he has to, but only the mildest forms of those facets.  The issue of Woody being second-favorite is never mentioned beyond the first movie, and wherever there’s a Buzz Lightyear, there’s almost always a Woody, but not vice versa.  Every movie revolves around Woody and relegates Buzz to barely more than comic fodder. Woody accepted life as a museum piece, but that was undone temporarily when he thought Jessie betrayed him, and shortly after that, undone permanently when he found out it was actually the Prospector that betrayed him.  Lots’o was bonkers and they couldn’t get out of that daycare fast enough.  Screw that bear, man.

But there’s no getting out of this one.  Woody has to accept it.  Become Duke Caboom: crying in the fetal position, in the bowels of a slot machine in an antique store run by a psychotic vintage talking doll, still racked with pain and isolation caused by a relentless resistance to the realities of his very existence.

Or be happier in a different life, and zoom around with his gf in an RC skunk driven incompetently by a three-headed, six-eyed porcelain sheep.

The better choice is clear.

It sounds contrary to a worldview that, until now, was perfectly logical.  Woody, buttressed by his role as an authority figure (he’s the sheriff, he wears the star, they’re not hiding this fact), abides by duty no matter the cost.  The lesson, phrased another way, is “dude, you need to be more flexible.”  Woody was, true to his name, not being a very good ragdoll. This applies not only to adapting to present circumstances emotionally and socially, but also philosophically.  Either stop living strictly by duty, or, when in a vacuum, assign your own duty.  Life demonstrates for Woody again what happiness can come from adapting to circumstances. Bo explicitly teaches him, albeit indirectly. Life’s demonstration though that finally gets it through is when they help Gabby pair up with a kid (who was also lost).  They didn’t expect to find a lost girl at a carnival, but they did, and bam, Gabby got a kid.

It finally sinks in.  Chill out, parkour with your gf, jump in the skunk, and embrace life.

Buzz Lightyear

Buzz is insane.  His conscience only works by push-button. The movie here is deliberate and explicit about this.  He can willfully and very, very easily ignore the shit out of it, and has!, as demonstrated by the fact that he has NOT HIT THAT BUTTON FOR THAT PURPOSE AT ANY POINT IN ANY OF THE MOVIES UNTIL NOW.  It is official:  Buzz Lightyear is a delightful, moronic sociopath.  Thank God he’s only a toy, but there’s still room for him to go Chucky, so everyone cross your fingers.  

That is all that can now be said of Buzz Lightyear.  I’m sorry Tim Allen.  For what it’s worth, I still love Buzz and will continue to! (so long as he doesn’t start indiscriminately murdering toys left and right)  He truly is delightful, and heroic, and magnanimous, and supportive, and fun.  All possible in no small part due to your talents, and Pixar’s.  Also notable is that the writers used a push-button conscience as a plot device really well, too, not just for humor, which to me would be really, really difficult to pull off (that one instance of blatant deus ex machina should be pardoned).  It was quite inventive and its use required skill, skill they very clearly have, both in writing, voice acting and animating.  

I still want to see more Buzz.  With or Without Woody.  

…wait…

The End …?

There is a feeling of finality in the end, but, Disney’s merch addiction notwithstanding, I doubt this will be the last time we see Woody play a significant role in future Toy Story movies even in the short term.  Regardless, the universe has infinite potential now that Pixar has just successfully navigated the process of one generation of toys passing the torch to a new generation of toys, a new cast of toys, in new circumstances, with new voices, and as long as Pixar can continually make that jump, they’ll be able to design and sell new toys to infinity and beyond.

The movie is good.  Well-written, well-acted, well-… pixel’ed?  (beyond well–pixeled in my opinion as Disney Research’s development of physically-based rendering is absolutely astounding).  None of this is to say any part of the movie needed to be fixed.  To the contrary, if you didn’t see these metaphors or were not put off by the movie’s conceits, then it is an even more powerful testament to the story-telling skill the Pixar writing staff wield in this and nearly every other movie they’ve made.  I’ve watched the movie a few times in the process of analyzing and writing this deconstruction, and the only way that’s possible is if the movie is fundamentally good in execution.  Nobody likes sifting through trash.  Except maybe Forky.  And that’s just fine.