Toy Story 3 (2010), directed by Lee Unkrich, is the greatest American animated movie ever made. I know this pronouncement will inspire scorn, since, although the film is popular, it doesn’t get the same reverence as rightful classics like The Lion King (1994), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). But even against heavyweights such as these, Toy Story 3 is king. I’ll dedicate this essay to arguing this claim with a careful analysis of the movie’s themes and characters.
I.
I’ll start by noting that Toy Story 3 is in some ways a remake of an earlier, lesser-known animated feature: Disney’s The Brave Little Toaster (1987), a film about anthropomorphic gang of household appliances whose owner has seemingly left them behind. The gadgets, who only spring to life when humans leave the vicinity, depart the house in desperate search of their “master” and wrestle with the possibility that they’re simply no longer valuable to him.
The Brave Little Toaster is remarkably dark and in some scenes outright disturbing. The movie climaxes in a junkyard, where broken down cars are being chomped to their deaths in a compressor, all the while singing about their assorted regrets. Their laments are harrowing and severe. For instance, you may notice if you watch the clip (linked above), which I’ll continue to refer to throughout this essay, that the final car, who sings of his loving owners eventually having to abandon him when he became too old for use, doesn’t need to be craned to his death—instead, he voluntarily drives into the compressor. (It’s no wonder so many of the YouTube comments recall childhood nightmares stemming from this film.)
But for all TBLT’s embrace of dark situations, the final punch is pulled. That is to say, unlike the junkyard cars, Toaster and his buddies have an owner, Rob, who, inexplicably, actually does want to keep them—so badly, in fact, that when he finds them in the junkyard, he almost dies trying to pull them off the electromagnet. The whole thing was a misunderstanding: he never meant to leave them behind.
So the movie ends happily with a reunion. Still, the overall effect is unsettling: what would have happened to Toaster and his friends if their owner weren’t a fanatical junk enthusiast? What happens to every other toaster, lamp, radio, vacuum cleaner, and blanket in this universe? The Brave Little Toaster attempts to lift our spirits, but it only makes us thankful that Rob is a borderline insane individual.
We’ll give it a pass, though. TBLT confronts a thorny theme that probably doesn’t belong in a children’s movie to begin with: the dark prospect of abandonment. Who could blame it for a less than honest ending? Come to think of it, even for adults, is there any film in existence that takes that most shudder-inducing of real world facts—that our loved ones sometimes move on from us—and gives it authentic positivity? Would such a film even be possible?
II.
Eight years after TBLT’s release, one of its lead animators, John Lasseter, directed and co-wrote the first full-length CGI film ever made, Toy Story (1995). And it features a suspiciously familiar premise: household objects are secretly alive, and they pine for love and usefulness. For the second time, Lasseter uses this concept as a springboard for exploring themes of replacement and moving on: the story revolves around protagonist Sheriff Woody’s (Tom Hanks) coming to terms with losing his role as “Andy’s favorite toy.”
But despite the excellence of Toy Story, the viewers are again spared: Woody ultimately befriends newcomer Buzz and realizes that they can both be loved by Andy: the jealousy and competition were, it turns out, unnecessary. Woody’s line from early in the film proves correct: “No one is getting replaced.”
Lasseter returns to write and direct Toy Story 2 (1999), though, and this time he’s bold enough to suggest that, actually, one day, things might not be so rosy. One of the antagonists, Stinky Pete, repeatedly raises the uncomfortable truth that, one day, all toys are thrown away:
Stinky Pete: Idiots! Children destroy toys! You’ll all be ruined! Forgotten! Rotting for eternity in some landfill!
And a new character, Jessie, exemplifies this trajectory in the movie’s most emotional sequence. But in the end of this relatively weak installment, Woody and friends simply decide to return to Andy and triumphantly do so.
It’s plain to see what’s happening. The series is careening closer and closer to The Brave Little Toaster. It’s as if the evil electromagnet were pulling us (or, more accurately, Lasseter) back toward that creepy junkyard, where Toaster and his pals witnessed the truth about what eventually happens to anthropomorphic junk.
And in Toy Story 3 (2010), with Lasseter co-writing, we finally get there. This time, there’s no deus ex machina: Andy is a normal boy on his way to college, not a weird trash lover like Rob, and like every normal college-bound boy, he no longer plays with toys. Our beloved characters, whose existences were defined by Andy’s love in the first two movies, are put away for storage and accidentally thrown out.
III.
Why does this premise have such an emotional hold on us? We in the audience aren’t toys or toasters; we don’t need to be played with or used; we don’t have owners—and yet, this is a heartbreaking exposition. Why?
Consider that these characters, unlike any other characters in the history of cinema, are literally mass-produced. They’re made in a factory, painted, distributed. They have many identical replicas in the world. As Buzz painfully learns in the first movie, they’re not unique.
I think that our peculiar attachment to Woody and his pals is for precisely this reason. It allows these movies to tap into a feeling characteristic of contemporary life, a kind of dread, actually: the worry that we aren’t meaningfully unique, that we’re completely replaceable.
It affects all of us. On one hand, we know that we have personalities and experiences that make us unlike any other single person. But on the other hand, don’t our experiences sometimes bitterly suggest that even those who love us can find a person just as good, if not better, when the time is right?
These days, we move around a lot: home to home, employer to employer, relationship to relationship, group of friends to group of friends—and there’s always someone to fill our places. Plus, we live pretty long—long enough, in fact, for many of us to see the day (like the last car in the junkyard) when our caretakers simply leave us. Are we actually so unique and invaluable, then, in today’s world? Or can anyone be replaced on a whim?
IV.
Enter Lots-o’-Huggin Bear, the most terrifying animated villain in movie history. I assure you that the evil queen from Snow White cowers before him. Ursula’s tentacles quiver at the mention of his name. Scar whimpers like a kitten, I’ve heard, at a whiff of his strawberry scent. 
Like every Disney or Pixar villain, Lotso is a selfish fiend. Unlike the others, though, he’s not out to gain anything. He’s not trying to take over a kingdom or marry the protagonist. He already runs Sunnyside, and he’s content to continue doing so. His selfishness, rather, is the avoidance of his own emotional pain—at any cost.
This alone makes Lotso infinitely more relatable than the typical larger than life villains trotted out by animation studios. He’s especially relatable, in fact, to the heroes of Toy Story 3. After all, his story isn’t so different from theirs in the prior installments: after being separated from his beloved owner, he arduously treks home to rejoin her. But instead of slipping happily back into place, as they’re able to do, Lotso finds that he has already been replaced by an identical toy.
What if, during Woody’s absence in Toy Story, Andy’s mom had bought a new sheriff? Or a new Buzz in Toy Story 2? It isn’t farfetched at all: as I noted before, the toys are literally mass-produced objects.
So how can they refute Lotso when he preaches the doctrine that all toys are nothing more than interchangeable pieces of plastic? Not only could they have easily met his fate, but they are also at this very moment essentially meeting it anyway: with Andy on his way to college, his toys are obsolete. He has replaced them with a new life, his young adult life. Even Woody, who’s coming along for sentimental reasons, will never be played with again.
Lotso thus has the upper hand, and he exerts it calmly in their haunting confrontation atop a dumpster:
Lotso: What are y’all doing? Runnin’ back to your kid? He don’t want you no more!”
Woody: That’s a lie.
Lotso: Is it? Tell me this Sheriff: if your kid loves you so much, why is he leaving?
There it is, plainly put. This question from Lotso, although it may not be clear at first viewing, is what the trilogy has been working toward all along. It’s the question that The Brave Little Toaster was ultimately too timid to ask but which Lasseter has finally built himself up to pose with seriousness: If a loving bond ends in abandonment, how can it have been real love?
The toys must use all they’ve learned and experienced over the course of the series to respond to this frightening rhetoric. For example, when Lotso drawlingly suggests they come back and “join our family again,” Jessie bursts out, “This isn’t a family! You’re a liar and a bully! … I’d rather rot in this dumpster than join any ‘family’ of yours.” Consider how moving this is from Jessie, who early in Toy Story 2 was desperate to have Woody complete her “family” of Roundup characters so as to avoid being shoved aside as she was by her previous owner. Now, she’s willing to accept oblivion. She’s learned a new definition of family, and she won’t settle for anything less.
Next we get another inspiring moment, this one from an unlikely character. When I first viewed Toy Story 3, I wondered early on why Pixar opted to introduce Barbie and Ken to the mix; after all, they’re a bit overdone. But in the face of Lotso’s taunting, that very ubiquity enables this show-stopping exchange:
Ken: Don’t do this, Lotso!
Lotso: She’s a Barbie doll, Ken! There’s a hundred million just like her!”
Ken: Not to me, there’s not.
Ken has been wholly comic relief until this line, so there’s a temptation to laugh it off, but where in all of Pixar/Disney is there a more genuine romantic moment?
I’m serious. Sure, the studios have fed us memorable love stories for decades, but they’re fairy tales. They’re fated, mandated by destiny. The characters are so exceptional—being various blends of every admirable quality imaginable (and usually royalty, too)—that how could the pairings not work out? Meanwhile, Ken confronts the existence of an infinite number of exactly equivalent options, and, risking death, still chooses Barbie—because….she’s herself. You tell me which is more romantic.
These heroic stands by Ken and Jessie jab at Lotso’s bleak philosophy, but they don’t really faze him. His question still stands: If your kid loves you so much, why is he leaving? He hurls Ken over the dumpster and makes the point again:
Lotso: I didn’t throw you away, your kid did! Ain’t no kid ever loved a toy, really.
For me, this is brutal to watch. He’s hitting them where it hurts. How can the toys, who have sacrificed so much for Andy’s love only to be put away in the attic and left behind, disprove Lotso?
Luckily for the toys—and for us, since, as I’ve indicated, we’re invested in this philosophical clash too—there’s one toy equipped through experience to do rhetorical battle with Lotso. Only Sheriff Woody can save the day.
Woody alone in the series has felt the pain of being replaced. Recall that in the first movie, he’s overcome by jealousy when Buzz becomes Andy’s new favorite toy, and is driven to reprehensible acts. He knows what this feeling can do to a toy, so he steps up and diagnoses the problem:
Lotso: Then she threw us out.
Woody: No. She lost you!
Lotso: She replaced us!
Woody: She replaced you, and if you couldn’t have her, no one could!
Although he’s referring to Lotso’s treatment of Big Baby here, he’s more generally criticizing Lotso’s overall philosophy, essentially arguing: “If you couldn’t be loved, then you decided love was impossible for anyone!” He’s pointing out the disingenuousness of Lotso’s cynicism, speaking, as I’ve said, from experience.
The truly inspiring development, however, is that after Woody recognizes that Lotso was indeed replaced, he insists: “She loved you, Lotso. As much as any kid ever loved a toy.”
Think about this. Woody isn’t saying that Daisy still loves Lotso in any practical sense; he knows she doesn’t. He’s saying that she did love him, and that’s enough. Even though she found another to fill his place, it was love while it lasted, and it was worthwhile. Only someone who was replaced, got past it painfully, and adjusted to a new normal could have made this remarkable statement. Consider too that Woody is by extension admitting that Andy, too, may one day no longer love his toys—perhaps he already doesn’t—but at the same time is declaring that, really, it’s beside the point.
As proof, Woody throws over Daisy’s heart badge. It’s now plain for everyone to see: Woody’s right. Who could’ve made that adorable badge, besides a girl who loved her toy? So what if he was replaced?
But Lotso doesn’t break. Rather than concede defeat, he reveals himself as not merely a commentator on interchangeability, but a purveyor of full-blown nihilism, screaming this horrific line, which, re-watching the scene, gives me chills:
Lotso: We’re all just trash, waitin’ to be thrown away!
What doctrine could be sadder? The event of Lotso’s replacement has led him to this: a declaration of total meaninglessness. It’s no surprise, with this worldview, that at the crucial moment later on, he effectively attempts to murder the toys, departing with an absurd taunt that reinforces his ignorance of anything not beneficial to survival: “Where’s your kid now, Sheriff?” The character of Lotso thus demonstrates the particular route to evil that begins with loss.
V.
But as Woody later remarks, “He’s not worth it.” They’ve refuted him and his cynicism, so, unlike in The Brave Little Toaster, the junkyard becomes not bleak and harrowing, but merely the unfortunate end of a long road. Since they’ve experienced love and friendship along that road, they’re prepared to accept it. Out of good fortune they’re rescued by their alien friends (who, it seems, have completed their own arc, now controlling ‘The Claw’ for the good of others rather than accepting it as an agent of fate, perhaps inspired by Woody’s recent saving of one of their own), and so they’re free to start anew with Bonnie.
The ensuing scene is mostly tear-jerking that doesn’t need analysis, but there is one interesting moment. When Andy introduces his toys to Bonnie, he mostly describes their media personas—Buzz as a cool space ranger, Jessie as a spunky cowgirl—but summarizes Woody by saying, “He will never, ever, give up on you.” That’s a strange sendoff for Woody. What about his selflessness and leadership—far more defining traits throughout the series? What is Andy referring to?
He’s talking about Woody’s clash with Lotso. Woody alone was able to argue that Andy’s necessary departure and separation from his toys doesn’t make him unloving; it doesn’t take away all they went through together when Andy was younger. Woody alone never gave up on Andy’s love, temporary though it unfortunately had to be. Woody, chiefly, has enabled this moment, where Andy can give them a simple confirmation that, indeed, Lotso was wrong, and everything was real:
“Thanks guys.”
P.S.
You may believe me guilty of overthinking a heartwarming family film. Maybe I have. But when themes like these are concerned, it’s far better to overthink than to under-think. Remember Lotso’s raging line to the toys atop the dumpster: “This is what happens when you dummies try to think!”
This is a revealing insult, because Lotso’s original error is that he doesn’t think. When he sees Daisy with the replacement Lotso, he immediately lets his emotions get the better of him and never looks back. He never stops to consider that in order for Daisy’s parents to buy her an identical replacement, she must have been inconsolable when she realized he was gone.
He doesn’t think about the tantrums that must have occurred. He doesn’t think about the tears, the screaming, the devastation. Had he done so, his goodness could have been salvaged.
It’s a very relatable mistake. It’s hard to think clearly when things seem so terrible. But watching movies like Toy Story 3 helps us sort out these issues so that, perhaps, they won’t ruin us in real life. Woody dissuades us from believing our gut reactions that tell us, inaccurately, that we were fooled in thinking we were loved—that “we’re all just trash, waitin’ to be thrown away!”
And that’s why Toy Story 3 is an amazing movie. But, I know, I know: that’s great, but you still like The Lion King more.
— Jim Andersen
For more analyses of popular movies, check out my explanation of Donnie Darko.
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