I wanted to like this but he's really overreaching to make his point. Sid burns a hole in Woody's forehead with a magnifying glass, and plans to incinerate him on a charcoal grill. He isn't...
I wanted to like this but he's really overreaching to make his point. Sid burns a hole in Woody's forehead with a magnifying glass, and plans to incinerate him on a charcoal grill. He isn't strapping a rocket on Buzz's back to help him fly, he's strapping an explosive on his back to blow him up. Sid's not the steward of broken toys, he's the one who breaks them in the first place. It takes a very selective reading of the movie to come to any other conclusion.
Poggy's saying that Sid's room is a makerspace where his toys are learning valuable field medicine techniques. It's not. He takes a brand-new alien toy from Pizza Planet and immediately hands it over to the dog to chew on. It's lovely that Sally and Pterodactyl got their heads and bodies reunited, but it was Sid who separated them to begin with. You can't paint him as a creative life-giver when he clearly gets his kicks from mutilating his wards.
It's true that his toys banded together in solidarity. They're all united in their victimhood. But they don't view Sid as a benefactor — they obviously hate him as much as Woody does, as evidenced by their participation in the uprising. Also I should point out that many of them are grotesque amalgamations of multiple toys. Toy Story has always played fast and loose with questions about toy consciousness, but I'd wager that if you combine the head of one with the body of another, at least one of the original toys is either annihilated or in endless agony. Babyface, Ducky, Legs, and the rest of the mutants all appear to be individuals. So what happened to their constituent identities? Sid is stitching dead bodies together like Dr. Frankenstein.
As for Andy's room and the argument that it represents a worldview of toys only existing as objects for the pleasure of their owners... well, yeah. That's the human toy condition. If the freeze reflex is an unavoidable fact of their existence, so is the fact that they were literally created for the purpose of being child's playthings. I mean, that's grim for sentient characters but you can only fight your reality so much. If the toys are looking to find meaning in life, there's no point in searching outside of the parameters that constrain them.
Woody and his friends do find fulfillment through playtime with their owners, and that seems pretty close to self-actualization for beings in their predicament. Over the series, we see a few views of alternative existences for toys: Gathering dust (perhaps still in original packaging!) in a collection in Toy Story 2, being abused by swarming preschoolers in Toy Story 3, and of course being tortured by a psychopath in the first film. None of those are any more appealing than playing with Andy. Maybe Bo Peep's onto something in Toy Story 4, a life of freedom and self-reliance sounds appealing. I can see why Woody went with her. But it's also lonely, and perilous. It's a big world out there and toys are fragile. They're always one freeze reflex away from an encounter with a human who's more likely to toss them in the trash than give them another loving home. Maybe that's why (we can see from the trailer) Woody comes back to rejoin the gang in Toy Story 5.
By comparison to those other options, at least Andy played with his toys gently, kept them safe, and donated them to a younger kid when he outgrew them. That's the absolute most any of them ought to be able to wish for in life. That's as good as it gets.
Kinda bleak, and uncomfortably close to the "good master" defense of slavery, but that's the cosmology Toy Story exists within.
That was always something that I had questions about in Toy Story, if you customized your Transfomer or Gundam figurines, what happens to all the spare parts? What if you had a bunch of Lego...
Toy Story has always played fast and loose with questions about toy consciousness, but I'd wager that if you combine the head of one with the body of another, at least one of the original toys is either annihilated or in endless agony.
That was always something that I had questions about in Toy Story, if you customized your Transfomer or Gundam figurines, what happens to all the spare parts? What if you had a bunch of Lego Minifigs that you were constantly swapping heads on, is there identity such that they would swap back when you're not looking or are they new individuals and exist until they don't? The consciousness of Forky implies that toys come into being, and Buzz as Ms. Nesbit implies that a new owner can replace the previous personage, so maybe there's an understanding as a toy that you are what your kids think of you, and you're not what you're not, up to and including a conscious being.
The Potato Heads’ appendages seem like they’re just accessories that can be swapped freely, like a Lego minifig head. Changing from one nose to another doesn’t alter the toy’s identity. We also...
The Potato Heads’ appendages seem like they’re just accessories that can be swapped freely, like a Lego minifig head. Changing from one nose to another doesn’t alter the toy’s identity. We also see a tortilla being used instead of the potato, but it’s still Mr. Potato Head. At other times we see him accessing the sight from his eyes at a distance, and speaking through his mouth at a distance. So I’d say his consciousness is evenly distributed among all his parts.
I’m still curious about a few things:
Mr. Potato Head has multiple parts of each type… can he use all of them simultaneously?
If Andy buys a Parts ‘n’ Pieces Pack for him, do the new pieces absorb his identity or remain separate?
What happens if Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head shuffle all their parts together and arrange two spuds containing bits of each of them? I assume each part still belongs to its owner so I guess they’d both be wrestling for control of both bodies.
What happens if one of Mr. Potato Head’s eyes is destroyed? Does he merely lose that sense organ, or also does that also affect his cognition, memory, sense of self, etc. since his identity is distributed among all his parts? Is each part entirely redundant, allowing him to survive fully intact in a single piece after all the others are destroyed?
If Lego follows the same rules, I guess a kid’s entire Lego collection would be one organism made of hundreds of parts. Each minifig would just be an avatar of it. Not sure what happens when new Lego sets are introduced, maybe they just get assimilated like Borg drones.
I don’t think Mrs. Nesbit was a new personality being put on Buzz. We see other toys change owners in the series and they all retain their identities. I think Mrs. Nesbit was just Buzz having an existential crisis. He had finally accepted that he was not a Space Ranger, and was just a toy, but that realization shattered his world. It broke him. He eventually came to terms with it, but that moment in Sid’s house was his rock bottom crash out.
I found this YouTube channel the other day after watching Pluribus. His analyses have been really interesting so far. He always brings new ideas that I haven't considered before that show movies...
I found this YouTube channel the other day after watching Pluribus. His analyses have been really interesting so far. He always brings new ideas that I haven't considered before that show movies or series in a new light.
I rewatched Toy Story 1 during the holidays and this video completely flips the story on its head. I had read some discussions about it the other day, since Toy Story 5 will be coming out next summer, and the fact that Sid becomes a garbage man came up, but I didn't think too deeply about it. iirc it was brought up in a negative light. I like this new framing that Sid sees value in trash. It closes his arc quite well. For him, things have value even if they aren't in pristine conditions.
This is awesome - we just recently watched this with my kid and it was the first movie he ever sat all the way through. I love this kind of analysis. While watching I was thinking about how Woody...
This is awesome - we just recently watched this with my kid and it was the first movie he ever sat all the way through. I love this kind of analysis. While watching I was thinking about how Woody is definitely not a good guy, and this video does a great job at laying out why/how.
[meta] I have only seen the first two Toy Story movies, but would like to see the third and fourth eventually. Is this video just about the first movie, or does it have spoilers for the others?
[meta]
I have only seen the first two Toy Story movies, but would like to see the third and fourth eventually. Is this video just about the first movie, or does it have spoilers for the others?
Just the first movie. Well there are a few small references to the second one as well. Edit: Oh, apologies, it does mention that we briefly see Sid as an adult in Toy Story 3. But his appearance...
Just the first movie. Well there are a few small references to the second one as well.
Edit: Oh, apologies, it does mention that we briefly see Sid as an adult in Toy Story 3. But his appearance is more of an easter egg than anything relevant to the plot, so I’m not even using a spoiler tag for it here.
I wanted to like this but he's really overreaching to make his point. Sid burns a hole in Woody's forehead with a magnifying glass, and plans to incinerate him on a charcoal grill. He isn't strapping a rocket on Buzz's back to help him fly, he's strapping an explosive on his back to blow him up. Sid's not the steward of broken toys, he's the one who breaks them in the first place. It takes a very selective reading of the movie to come to any other conclusion.
Poggy's saying that Sid's room is a makerspace where his toys are learning valuable field medicine techniques. It's not. He takes a brand-new alien toy from Pizza Planet and immediately hands it over to the dog to chew on. It's lovely that Sally and Pterodactyl got their heads and bodies reunited, but it was Sid who separated them to begin with. You can't paint him as a creative life-giver when he clearly gets his kicks from mutilating his wards.
It's true that his toys banded together in solidarity. They're all united in their victimhood. But they don't view Sid as a benefactor — they obviously hate him as much as Woody does, as evidenced by their participation in the uprising. Also I should point out that many of them are grotesque amalgamations of multiple toys. Toy Story has always played fast and loose with questions about toy consciousness, but I'd wager that if you combine the head of one with the body of another, at least one of the original toys is either annihilated or in endless agony. Babyface, Ducky, Legs, and the rest of the mutants all appear to be individuals. So what happened to their constituent identities? Sid is stitching dead bodies together like Dr. Frankenstein.
As for Andy's room and the argument that it represents a worldview of toys only existing as objects for the pleasure of their owners... well, yeah. That's the
humantoy condition. If the freeze reflex is an unavoidable fact of their existence, so is the fact that they were literally created for the purpose of being child's playthings. I mean, that's grim for sentient characters but you can only fight your reality so much. If the toys are looking to find meaning in life, there's no point in searching outside of the parameters that constrain them.Woody and his friends do find fulfillment through playtime with their owners, and that seems pretty close to self-actualization for beings in their predicament. Over the series, we see a few views of alternative existences for toys: Gathering dust (perhaps still in original packaging!) in a collection in Toy Story 2, being abused by swarming preschoolers in Toy Story 3, and of course being tortured by a psychopath in the first film. None of those are any more appealing than playing with Andy. Maybe Bo Peep's onto something in Toy Story 4, a life of freedom and self-reliance sounds appealing. I can see why Woody went with her. But it's also lonely, and perilous. It's a big world out there and toys are fragile. They're always one freeze reflex away from an encounter with a human who's more likely to toss them in the trash than give them another loving home. Maybe that's why (we can see from the trailer) Woody comes back to rejoin the gang in Toy Story 5.
By comparison to those other options, at least Andy played with his toys gently, kept them safe, and donated them to a younger kid when he outgrew them. That's the absolute most any of them ought to be able to wish for in life. That's as good as it gets.
Kinda bleak, and uncomfortably close to the "good master" defense of slavery, but that's the cosmology Toy Story exists within.
That was always something that I had questions about in Toy Story, if you customized your Transfomer or Gundam figurines, what happens to all the spare parts? What if you had a bunch of Lego Minifigs that you were constantly swapping heads on, is there identity such that they would swap back when you're not looking or are they new individuals and exist until they don't? The consciousness of Forky implies that toys come into being, and Buzz as Ms. Nesbit implies that a new owner can replace the previous personage, so maybe there's an understanding as a toy that you are what your kids think of you, and you're not what you're not, up to and including a conscious being.
The Potato Heads’ appendages seem like they’re just accessories that can be swapped freely, like a Lego minifig head. Changing from one nose to another doesn’t alter the toy’s identity. We also see a tortilla being used instead of the potato, but it’s still Mr. Potato Head. At other times we see him accessing the sight from his eyes at a distance, and speaking through his mouth at a distance. So I’d say his consciousness is evenly distributed among all his parts.
I’m still curious about a few things:
If Lego follows the same rules, I guess a kid’s entire Lego collection would be one organism made of hundreds of parts. Each minifig would just be an avatar of it. Not sure what happens when new Lego sets are introduced, maybe they just get assimilated like Borg drones.
I don’t think Mrs. Nesbit was a new personality being put on Buzz. We see other toys change owners in the series and they all retain their identities. I think Mrs. Nesbit was just Buzz having an existential crisis. He had finally accepted that he was not a Space Ranger, and was just a toy, but that realization shattered his world. It broke him. He eventually came to terms with it, but that moment in Sid’s house was his rock bottom crash out.
I found this YouTube channel the other day after watching Pluribus. His analyses have been really interesting so far. He always brings new ideas that I haven't considered before that show movies or series in a new light.
I rewatched Toy Story 1 during the holidays and this video completely flips the story on its head. I had read some discussions about it the other day, since Toy Story 5 will be coming out next summer, and the fact that Sid becomes a garbage man came up, but I didn't think too deeply about it. iirc it was brought up in a negative light. I like this new framing that Sid sees value in trash. It closes his arc quite well. For him, things have value even if they aren't in pristine conditions.
This is awesome - we just recently watched this with my kid and it was the first movie he ever sat all the way through. I love this kind of analysis. While watching I was thinking about how Woody is definitely not a good guy, and this video does a great job at laying out why/how.
[meta]
I have only seen the first two Toy Story movies, but would like to see the third and fourth eventually. Is this video just about the first movie, or does it have spoilers for the others?
Just the first movie. Well there are a few small references to the second one as well.
Edit: Oh, apologies, it does mention that we briefly see Sid as an adult in Toy Story 3. But his appearance is more of an easter egg than anything relevant to the plot, so I’m not even using a spoiler tag for it here.