Toy Story 4

TOY STORY 4   ***

Josh Cooley

2019

IDEA:  When Bonnie loses her new "toy" on a family road trip, Woody and the gang set out to rescue him from an antiques shop.

BLURB:  All the Toy Story films are underpinned by the same evergreen tangle of existential anxieties, but in Toy Story 4, the angst takes on perhaps its most febrile form yet. This is largely due to the character of Forky. A bricolage of trash that inexplicably gains sentience, Forky is an exemplary unheimlich creation, cast-out matter that has returned from that abject place called the “garbage” to remind the toys (and the audience) of our fragile, contingent selves. With his exposed component parts, he reveals the body in its fundamentally violable corporeality, even as his consciousness transcends the individual functions of those pieces. As a result, he catalyzes thought-provoking questions around identity, which extend to a host of other new characters who, in their own ways, contemplate, mourn, or attempt to resolve problems around their origins and (intended) purposes. However foolhardy it may be to seriously analyze the ontological dimensions of the films' intricately realized but admittedly inconsistent universe, Toy Story 4’s heightened attention to its own material logic is its most fascinating development, and encourages productive evaluations of taken-for-granted existential knowledge. It also keeps the mind reeling through the slick but busy action scenes, and makes the jarringly photorealistic animation seem like an apt aesthetic to convey the tactile horrors lying in wait for a toy. Toy Story 4 may not be a patch on the Trilogy, but by amping up its characters’ neuroses, it produces unusual and memorable effects new to the series.