The cute concept of the original 1995 Toy Story, the first ever Pixar feature, is the stuff of many a kid’s childhood fantasy. Most important, he doesn’t know why he’s alive, and reader, that’s when I leaned forward in my seat. His body is a plastic spork, his feet are made of broken popsicle sticks, and his hands are gnarled pipe cleaners that grasp at the air with maniacal urgency.
But the film’s most challenging, bizarre, and lovable material involves a beady-eyed Frankenstein’s monster named Forky (Tony Hale) who becomes the newest addition to Bonnie’s flock after she builds him in kindergarten class. Toy Story 4 wisely feels like less of a new chapter and more like an epilogue, an addendum for Woody that muses on the peculiarities of the symbiotic relationship between toys and humans these movies have long explored. After all, the first three films told a fairly complete story about the life cycle of a toy, following the felt cowboy Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) as he lived a whole childhood with his owner, Andy, and then moved on to a new kid named Bonnie. Toy Story 4, the latest entry in Pixar’s greatest series, on paper seems like a superfluous endeavor. Once you’ve completed at least one trilogy’s worth of stories, your next movie should try to dig into the notion of sentience. It’s a direction I wish more long-running brands would take in their later sequels. It was only a matter of time before the Toy Story franchise started asking questions about the very nature of consciousness.
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