The (almost inevitable) nightmare of abandonment or loss of love is literalized in being treated as “trash” or junk (in a landfill), denied any personhood or value by the former partner/parent/love object. All of the toys begin to seem like abandoned spouses, yearning for contact.
#TOY STORY 3 SUNNYSIDE DAYCARE MOVIE#
The movie begins with the toys engaging in “one last plan” to somehow induce Andy to pick them up and play with them the way he once did: pathetically, the only way they can think to do this is to steal his cell phone, to which Andy has transferred all his attention. They gaze with longing at their child who no longer will look at them, love them, touch them. The toys’ experience of displacement and denied love is given disturbing overtones of sexless, loveless marriages. Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, denied affection, transforms into the cruel prison boss Lotso. Part of what’s so powerful about the movie is the way it traffics in a primal fear of loss of love.
Lotso was always Daisy’s most “special” toy when they somehow make it back to Daisy’s house after an Incredible Journey-like odyssey, and Lotso sees through the window that he’s been replaced by another bear of the same model, he can’t accept his own displacement, and allows the experience to turn him into a brutal cynic who no longer believes in any primary human-toy affectual bond. We eventually learn that the bear and doll were abandoned at a rest stop by their own first owner, Daisy. Perhaps the most chilling image is the initially adorable, ultimately frightening baby infant doll, who toddles around cooing as Lotso’s golem-like enforcer. At this point the movie turns into a creepy Manchurian Toy narrative filled with Cold War anti-communist tropes (overlapping with prison-movie conventions). It turns out that Sunnyside is actually no utopia but a prison-camp Gulag nightmare, and Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear not a wise and loving elder but “Lotso,” a cynical and cruel (and, as we learn, emotionally traumatized) despot. (And the toys are always donated, not purchased.) Woody seems like a stubborn, old-fashioned individualist capitalist holdout, insisting to his comrades that “we have an owner, his name is Andy, remember?” But the other toys refuse to go back to Andy’s attic (to wait patiently and perhaps hopelessly for the possibility of Andy eventually passing them on to his own children). Love is free, easily passed on from individual to individual. It’s presented as a kind of socialism of love and play: the toys enjoy no primary human bond, but are played with by a cycling collective of children. (That’s the most unrealistic part of the Toy Story films, that Woody & Buzz and friends would survive for 10-15 years.)Īt Sunnyside, as the reigning, avuncular patriarch Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear (who “smells like strawberries”) explains, toys escape the remorseless cycle of child aging and emotional withdrawal from the world of play: as we can see from the class photos on the wall, when one group of children ages, another replaces them. It’s the old Velveteen Rabbit problem, exacerbated in an age of cheap Chinese plastic toys. The child ages and casts the toys aside: if they’re lucky, to be saved for the child’s own children a generation later more likely, tossed out. For a toy attached to a single human child, obsolescence is all but guaranteed. Although Woody is suspicious, the other toys view Sunnyside as a utopian solution to their dilemma. Andy is going off to college and is consigning his old toys to the attic - unless he’s persuaded by his mother to donate them to the local Sunnyside Daycare. I was fascinated by the way it seems to play out a conflict between what could be described as emotional capitalism and emotional socialism. I took the girls to see Toy Story 3 on a hot and humid July 4 afternoon.
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