Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four – Part Five
The reveal of Lotso’s true nature comes slowly. We might suspect that he knew more than he let on about the kind of playtime the toys could expect in the Caterpillar Room. As the toy in charge at Sunnyside, how could he not? But when Buzz breaks out of the Caterpillar Room and discovers the Butterfly Room elite gambling in the top of a vending machine, it raises the possibility that something is going on behind Lotso’s back. These are the toys that we and Buzz hear dismissing the newcomers as “toddler fodder” unlikely to last very long. And when Lotso discovers that the other toys have tied Buzz up to interrogate him, his concern seems genuine. Even his explanation for the way Sunnyside is run doesn’t sound unreasonable to either Buzz or the audience. It’s not possible for all of the toys to stay in the Butterfly Room; some of them would inevitably be moved back into the Caterpillar Room by Sunnyside’s human staff. And the idea of putting the newest toys in with the toddlers, with the promise of someday moving up to the Butterfly Room, sounds like a fair system. But the other toys’ suggestions from earlier that Buzz and his friends are unlikely to last a week at Sunnyside hints at how the system is completely stacked against any new toy. Buzz doesn’t know this yet. He gets on Lotso’s bad side not by figuring out that the Caterpillar Room toys don’t stand a chance, but by turning down Lotso’s offer to move into the Butterfly Room while his friends remain where they are,
Buzz’s battery compartment isn’t something we’ve seen before, but it feels believable that it’s always been there. Something like Buzz sporting a firing plastic missile without any explanation where it came from would have been too much.. But the battery compartment is like Mr. Potato Head’s remote camera eye in Toy Story 2. We accept that it’s been there all along, but hasn’t been used before because we’ve just never seen Buzz having his batteries changed and neither Andy nor any of his toys would ever think to rest Buzz back to demo mode.
Speaking of the Potato Head’s eyes, Mrs. Potato Head’s missing eye becomes key to the story at this point. Until now, it was a visual reminder that these are aging toys who aren’t being regularly cared for anymore. But when Mrs. Potato Head uses her remaining eye to see what’s going on outside the Caterpillar Room, her lost eye is activated and she can see Andy in his room. Though she can’t hear anything, she sees Andy looking in the attic, then becoming visibly upset while talking with his mother. Mrs. Potato Head reaches the correct conclusion: Andy really did mean to put the toys in the attic and is now searching for them. The fact that we saw Mr. Potato Head using his eye like a camera for a relatively minor task in Toy Story 2 is a stroke of luck for the filmmakers. If we hadn’t already known how the Potato Heads’ eyes work, revealing it in this movie could have ended up feeling like too much of a plot convenience.
The toys’ reactions to this development shows how much their decision to stay at Sunnyside was based on the incorrect belief that Andy no longer wanted them. Like Woody, the other toys don’t believe that Andy is going to start playing with them again. They also don’t yet know that they won’t be permitted to move to the Butterfly Room where the older kids will play with them. If they did, then their decision would be about getting away from the rambunctious toddlers. But just knowing that Andy still does want them and is upset that he can’t find them is enough to make the toys change their minds and decide that they need to return home.
Prior to seeing the movie, I was a little worried that the final film in the Toy Story trilogy was once again returning to the deluded Buzz well. I understand that he’s a fun character with a lot of comic potential, but we already had a second dose of deluded Buzz in Toy Story 2. Yet another scenario where Buzz believes he’s a real space ranger struck me as unnecessary and a little too close to giving the audience the exact same thing that entertained them in the previous two movies. Part of what saves it is that this deluded Buzz isn’t quite the same as either of the prior two. He is Andy’s Buzz, so we care more about whether his normal personality is restored than we do about whether the second Buzz from Toy Story 2 ever figured out that he was a toy. He has a grace and flair to his movements that make him look like a confident action hero, but not the little over-the-top flourishes that made Toy Story 2‘s deluded Buzz particularly silly. (He will start moving with a lot of additional flourishes when his friends try to reset him back to normal.) And while the deluded Buzz of the previous film was actually trying to help our heroes and only posed a problem because he didn’t realize that he didn’t have space ranger abilities, Andy’s Buzz is now taking his orders from Lotso and poses a direct threat to the other toys. There’s also the interesting wrinkle that Buzz remains attracted to Jessie after being switched to demo mode and is actually more direct in expressing his interest in her while he is deluded. Later on in the movie, he’ll become even more open about his feelings for Jessie.
Barbie has her first moment of truth when she goes to find Ken and discovers Andy’s toys being imprisoned by Lotso and his cronies. Proving that she is more than just a ditzy doll who falls for the first Ken she meets, she immediately tells Ken off and goes to join her friends in their toy bin cells. Though Barbie was Molly’s toy and her friendship with the other toys hadn’t been established before, she is clearly very loyal to them and not about to be swayed by a guy with a swanky house and a big, well stocked closet.
Making Sunnyside into a prison involved some careful design choices. Sunnyside is a daycare first, so it can’t look like a daycare that was purposefully designed to look like a prison. The trick is making it look like a perfectly ordinary daycare that just happens to look like a prison from a toy’s perspective. The prison-like features of the actual setting are mainly limited to four elements: the playground with walls and equipment that resembles guard towers, the toy bins that form the toys’ cells, the sandbox that is used as “the box” where Lotso has toys in need of punishment sent, and the camera surveillance room. None of these feel out of place in a daycare, but when viewed under the right circumstances and with the aid of the toys treating Sunnyside as a prison, they add to the feeling that the toys have been thrown in jail.
With the help of Bonnie’s toys, Woody discovers that he is barely a block away from Andy’s house. He’s happily on his way back to Andy to accompany him to college, until he tells his newfound friends to look up his buddies at Sunnyside if they ever make it over there. Bonnie’s toys react in horror at the mention of Sunnyside and Woody starts to get an inkling of what the daycare is really like for toys.
Chuckles, the toy clown who gives Woody the inside story on Lotso and his history, got instant laughs when I saw the movie in theaters. The design of a grim-faced little clown is just funny all on its own. Chuckles gets his voice from Bud Luckey – a Pixar charater designer, storyboard artist, and animator as well as a legendary Sesame Street animator – who gives the performances the gruffness and world weary air of a clown who’s seen more than his share of trouble.
Like Woody and Jessie before him, Lotso was once a the most beloved toy of a child, in this case a little girl named Daisy. Chuckles tells Woody and us that Daisy was good to all of her toys – Chuckles, Lotso, and the doll who will later become Big Baby are the only ones we see – but Lotso was clearly the favorite and loved Daisy just as much as she loved him. Lotso is the one who spends the night in Daisy’s arms, the one who gets held up to look out the window in the car, the one who is constantly at Daisy’s side. The feel of the first part of this flashback is similar to Jessie’s memories of Emily. Both are montages of happy memories where the child’s face is largely unseen and the toys remain almost exclusively in inanimate toy mode. But where Jessie’s past was bathed in a warm glow, Chuckles’ memories of Daisy and Lotso start off almost washed out, with everything cast in pale yellows and browns except for the brilliantly pink Lotso. The effect suggests a time that has grown distant and faded in the minds of those who still remember it, which fits perfectly with the fact that these are memories Lotso has tried his best to forget and hints at the tragedy to come.
Lotso’s philosophy and Lotso himself are both concepts from early drafts of Toy Story, so it’s fitting that part of Lotso’s origin comes from that same source. Original Toy Story protagonist Tiiny lost his owner when he was accidentally left behind at a rest stop, which is exactly what happened to Lotso, Chuckles, and Big Baby. To her credit, Daisy fell asleep and had to be carried back to the car, so her parents bear the brunt of the blame for failing to realize that her toys had been left behind. While being lost is traumatic enough for any toy, this isn’t the event that changes Lotso. We’ve already seen toys react to being abandoned, whether accidentally or purposefully. What happens to Lotso is something different, though no less painful, especially considering that it is Lotso who decides to lead the grueling trek back to Daisy’s house to be with the child he loves.
The Toy Story films are filled with scenarios that can be seen as metaphors for all manner of human experiences. But part of what makes these movies so good is that the metaphor never overwhelms the reality of the story. They never cease to be movies about the lives and experiences of toys. We may well know what it’s like to be replaced in the affections of someone we love, but Lotso is replaced more completely and permanently than any human could ever be. It’s not clear if Daisy even realizes that this is a new Lots O’ Huggin Bear; whether her parents bought a new one and claimed to have “found” the original Lotso when Daisy discovered that her favorite toy was missing or if Daisy accepted a new bear without any trickery. But the end result is the same: Lotso realizes that Daisy didn’t love him as much as he loved her. Daisy may have replaced Lotso, but Lotso can never truly replace Daisy. He will go on to have brief, shallow, “love ‘em and leave ‘em” relationships with kids at Sunnyside, but he will never again really love a child. It’s a sad fate for a toy who braved so much to get back to his kid, and one that most of the toys we know could have just as easily suffered. Andy is unlikely to get new toys at this point, but the past two movies featured Andy’s toys getting lost or having to leave home and only returning in the nick of time. Longtime favorite and rare toy Woody might never have come home to find another Woody in Andy’s room, but any of the other toys could have discovered a similar or identical toy waiting for them had they been just a little later in getting back to Andy.
I’m not sure if Lotso is purposefully lying to Chuckles and Big Baby when he says that Daisy has replaced all of them. Chuckles tells Woody that something “snapped” in Lotso that night and under the circumstances, it’s easy to believe that Lotso was not in his right mind. What he tells Big Baby is “She don’t love you no more.” Even if he doesn’t believe that or that Daisy has replaced Chuckles and Big Baby, Lotso does believe that if Daisy can replace him, she can and eventually will replace the rest of her toys. His later dialogue reveals that Lotso has taken his twisted world view a step further and now believes not only that Daisy never really loved him, but also that no child can ever really love any toy. For him, it’s easier to believe this than to think that Daisy really did love him and was still able to replace him with another bear.
Just to kick Lotso when he’s down, Daisy is reading a book called “Friends Forever” to the replacement Lotso.
We’ve spent two previous movies getting to know Woody, so we know that there’s no way he’s going to leave his friends at Sunnyside. Yes, he decided to leave them behind earlier, but that was before he knew what Sunnyside was really like. So when Bonnie’s toys start pointing out how difficult it will be for Woody to break his friends out of Sunnyside and that Andy is leaving for college soon, it isn’t to get us wondering whether Woody will decide to just go home to Andy instead of rescuing his friends. It’s to remind us how high the stakes are for Woody. We know he won’t abandon his family, but we also get that he has a lot to lose.
The opening of the next scene is a good example of how the setting and the toys’ actions combine to evoke the feeling of a prison. The grey brown sky and tower visible through the window and the toy bin “cell block” create the right atmosphere. Even the sliding block toys on top of the shelf resemble barbed wire. Hamm playing the harmonica and Buzz banging on the bars to shut him up complete the picture.
Jessie offers Bullseye what comfort she can, which isn’t much. Thanks to Lotso discovering Woody’s missing hat and showing it to Andy’s toys, Jessie and the rest of her friends believe that Woody is dead, making their situation even more bleak. As if Jessie wasn’t feeling miserable enough, she catches sight of the “Andy” written on her foot. Of all the toys, Jessie had the most reason to fear being outgrown and discarded by Andy. She went through it once before with Emily and although she made the choice to become Andy’s toy knowing that it couldn’t last forever, she never lost that fear of being thrown away. Her last “breakup” was so painful that, as soon as she saw what she believed were signs that Andy didn’t want her and the other toys anymore, she left him before he could abandon her. Now Jessie is faced with the knowledge that she gave up on Andy when he still cared about her and that she is partly responsible for the predicament the toys find themselves in now.
Woody’s trek from the Butterfly Room to the Caterpillar Room shows off the level of detail present in both environments. Someone had to model those bottles of glue, pairs of scissors, and paper chains and someone had to create the various labels and artwork around both rooms. It may not be a glamorous job, but without these people, Sunnyside Daycare would look very empty.
Woody gets his real introduction to the chatter telephone, “the lifer” as the filmmakers dubbed him. The phone is a character who fits into the prison movie genre, that ubiquitous figure in such films who has been in jail for ages and managed to learn everything necessary to survive his long incarceration. He can speak, but only through his receiver, since his mouth is painted on. His expressions are conveyed solely through the movements of his eyes, eyelids, and eyebrows. His line – “They’ll never break me” – is common in prison movies, but gains a double meaning here. He will not be broken mentally by Lotso and his gang, nor physically by the toddlers of the Caterpillar Room. The phone gives a full description of Sunnyside’s security, also mentioning that it has increased since Woody escaped and that another breakout will be a lot harder. This ensures that both Woody and the audience know exactly what obstacles the toys will have to overcome in order to leave Sunnyside and get home to Andy.
The cymbal monkey that we saw Bonnie playing with when the toys first arrived at Sunnyside turns out to be Lotso’s watchman. The monkey uses the daycare’s surveillance cameras to keep an eye out for any toy trying to escape overnight and alert Lotso and his enforcers. It’s a good fit for the role; cymbal monkeys tend to be inherently frightening with their exposed teeth and bulging eyes. The combination of clashing cymbals and simian shrieks is already startlingly loud and when it’s used as an alarm, it only gets more so.
As in the first Toy Story, we don’t learn what Woody’s plan is; we just seeing it being put into action. We know that the toys will have to incapacitate the monkey, reset Buzz back to normal, unlock the door, and escape from Sunnyside, probably through the garbage chute. We don’t know exactly how they’re going to do it and because of that, the scenes of the escape are much more exciting. Only as we see it unfold do wo learn how much risk the plan involves. And because we don’t know what the steps are, we can’t always be sure what’s part of the plan and what might be an unexpected obstacle.
Mr. Tortilla Head is another case of a toy having a feature or ability that we’ve never seen before, this one much more active and useful to our heroes than Buzz’s battery compartment. Does it work? Absolutely. We’ve already seen that Mr. Potato Head’s eyes and mouth can function when they aren’t attached to his body, so it’s not much of a leap to have him be able to use various real foods as substitute bodies. The original Mr. Potato Head toy was just a set of features that kids could stick onto a real potato (not included), so there’s a connection to the actual toy’s history. So why hasn’t Mr. Potato Head ever done this before? Because he never had a reason to. Looking back at the first two movies, you’d be hard pressed to find any problems that could have been better solved by a walking tortilla. The animation of Mr. Tortilla Head is really entertaining. You can see just from the way he moves how much floppier and more cumbersome the tortilla is than his usual plastic potato body, to the point where he nearly falls backwards while trying to walk.
Next: Undercover Barbie, Buzz the Latin lover, and an unplanned trip to the dump.
All images in this article are copyright Disney/Pixar.
Tags: computer animation, disney, pixar
You wanna get outta here? GET RID OF THAT MONKEY!!!
Did anyone ever think these cymbal monkeys weren’t scary?
I really find it hard to believe that anyone could ignore their status as pure, unfiltered nightmare fuel…but I’m unaware of the toy’s real-world history, so I suppose it must have seemed like a good idea at SOME point. XD
I’ll post my full response to this wonderful set of reviews once the whole thing is wrapped up, but excellent work so far, as always. Your analysis of the subtle visual direction used to transform Sunnyside into an oppressive prison struck me as particularly apt; I had completely missed the faux-barbed wire until you pointed it out, for example.
Well, until then, cheers!
I find that a lot of older toys are kind of scary looking, so maybe it’s just changing standards of what’s entertaining and what’s terrifying.
The faux barbed wire is just one of those thing I only notice when I’m watching the same scene five times over. I don’t know that many people are consciously aware of it the first time around, but on a subconscious level, it adds to the ambiance.
I’m estimating two more articles before I put this thing to bed and I haven’t yet decided whether the next installment will be bumped back a week in favor of something more seasonally appropriate. So I’m looking forward to hearing your full response sometime next month.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by DOMINIC R PARIS, Sara Franks-Allen. Sara Franks-Allen said: Part 3 of #ToyStory3 is up. Beware of the SCARY MONKEY. http://inkandpixelclub.com/2010/12/saying-goodbye-toy-story-3-part-three/ [...]
[...] Saying Goodbye: Toy Story 3 – Part Three [...]
Wow, lots of ground covered in this post. I have to say, again because I really don’t have memories of Toy Story 2, the eye of Mrs. Potato Head back at Andy’s really did feel like too much of a plot convenience. But it was the only one so I let it go. Glad to read it was previously established!
My comment on Barbie is back on part 1.
You really do have to give kudos for all the attention to detail in this movie. For me, I particularly liked Chuckles in the flashback vs in Bonnie’s house. He remembers how it was and even tells himself as he used to be. Really adds to how dramatically Lotso must of changed, because the downward pointing hair on Chuckles was due to Bonnie replacing him and the rain. But the downward smile and the hard eyes didn’t happen in any of his flashbacks, those had to have been caused by Lotso at Sunnyside.
The design of Chuckles is just great all around. Not only does he get instant laughs when he first appears, but you have the added pleasure of learning that he didn’t always look like that and what happened to turn him into the clown he is now.
Buzz reverting back to Demo mode is also different because it is scary. The scene where he first comes back is quite chilling actually, because you can see that he’s different. Previously, his lines about Zurg and Star Command were for comic relief, but here, they are chilling because he doesn’t remember the past. It means that he can easily be brainwashed into evil things. That’s what saves what seems to be an unnecessary idea.
I especially love the scene where Buzz is beating up his friends and you see Lotso’s reaction. It really shows how evil he is; he’s willing to take a friend away from others for his own selfish desires.
You did a great job analyzing the movie. I’ve read all your posts here, and you brought up many points that I never thought of before. The scenes for Chuckles’s story caused me to feel something, but I wasn’t sure what it was until you mentioned the pale colours and their purpose. Good eye!