by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Pixar has always been interested in what would happen if non-human characters were sad. They shot out of the gate with "What would happen if toys were sad?" before asking "What would happen if ants were sad?" and continued on with monsters, fish, superheroes, cars, dinosaurs and the elements. What if a trash robot was sad? What if the personification of happiness was sad?

These movies are, I think, mostly very good. They're funny, the art direction is always well-considered and imaginative down to the smallest detail and they're perfectly cast. But there's this current of depression running through so many of Pixar's 27 features that I have a hard time knowing whether I'll pass them on to my son. He's almost two-years-old and loves Finding Nemo, though my partner and I fast-forward through the film's opening scene, where Nemo's mom and hundreds of siblings are immediately fridged. I don't know what I'll do when he's a little older and can be affected by Pixar's worst qualities, the stuff you can't skip past. You can complain about the constant character death, but it's deeper than that. It's an emotional uncanny valley, where things seem like understanding and awareness until you give them five extra seconds of consideration.

There's a persistent criticism that you'll see in reviews of most mainstream PG-13 action movies: They're bloodless, which means they're weightless. The blood stands in for consequence, with the idea being that James Bond, Ethan Hunt and most superheroes mow down their enemies without any recognition that they're actually killing people. The Fast and Furious crew will blow up a garage full of unnamed goons and Vin Diesel's character will mumble out some half-assed quip like he's racking up a high score. The camera never glides over all the charred bodies left in his wake. We never have to consider Vin's actions.

Pixar movies can have the opposite problem: There's too much blood. The consequences are ridiculous. In Toy Story 2, a little girl leaves a toy under her bed and inflicts endless trauma on an innocent who just wants to love and be loved. In Inside Out, a tween who's outgrown her old imaginary friend has, by not continuing to communicate with him, left him to wander alone in search of anybody who might remember him. His name is Bing Bong. He sacrifices himself and is forgotten.

The Toy Story series is Pixar's worst offender here, the first and best example of a company thinking it's promoting empathy while creating needlessly depressing art. Toy Storys 2 and 3 are especially rough, with Pixar's braintrust following their initial premise of "Hey, toys have feelings" to several grisly but logical conclusions. I mentioned the toy left under the bed-- if you don't remember, that's Jessie. She sings, in Sarah McLachlan's voice and with Randy Newman's music and lyrics, an ode to the few, brief years when she was loved by a human girl. But then the girl grows up, doesn't play with Jessie and ultimately gives her away. With all due respect to Randy Newman and Joan Cusack, both of whom I love, it's one of the most bitterly manipulative attempts to quickly gain an audience's sympathy. Jessie had love and then that love turned its back on her.

But what do you do with that? Do you empathize with Jessie? Her owner didn't know she was alive, didn't realize she was neglecting a friend, wouldn't have treated her toy so callously if she realized it was self-aware. Was the owner supposed to play with her childhood toys forever? Is maturing and moving on really that much of a sin? In Toy Story 2, it's tantamount to neglecting and eventually disposing of a loved one. In Inside Out, outgrowing an imaginary friend results in a cruelty you wouldn't inflict on your worst enemy.

You can push these things if you want to, warp their morals until they resemble insights into real life lessons. You could say that in Toy Story 2, Woody learns to accommodate Jessie's fears and her trauma. But in the movie, he does that by agreeing to stay in a glass prison for the foreseeable future. Again, what is a person to take away from that?

I don't think kids should be shielded from sad material, but I think that sad material should have a purpose. It should have some practical application to a child's life. The Toy Story movies make you sad about things that do not and will never exist. They create sadness but don't leave you with anything actionable. They don't emotionally prepare you for anything you'll ever face. They just make you worried about storing things on shelves. A kid would be better off watching Come and See, because at least then they'd walk off with a sense that war is a hellish mistake. They'd know something true about the world.

Toy Story 4 breaks this theme in its final moments, but the reactionary heart of the Toy Story films is that you should always hold onto what you have at the expense of an unsure future. Sure, you could develop new interests, but do you really want to abandon your old ones? They're alive, you monster.

It's easy to make this mistake in children's media-- if you're looking for an easy idea, simply anthropomorphize something. Here's one: There are a bunch of pieces of grass who are sad because people walk on them every day. Another: My pants love feeling my butt and get sad when I throw them away for being too worn down. They'll never touch my butt again. You can make your own up off the top of your head. The hard part is screwing this all together with some basis in real emotion, some reason to not make your story's literal metaphor "don't step on grass" or "keep every piece of clothing you've ever owned." The art that successfully works through this has a solid metaphorical basis; Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree is a sad book but it's about the sacrifices of parenthood. You read it and your empathy is directed to your own family, not talking trees. Toy Story merely creates a thing to be sad about. Toy Story doesn't tell you anything about people because its characters operate under bizarre, specific rules like "there is no death" and "the main characters cannot let the people they care about most that they're alive." It's reckless, and I wouldn't say that about more depressing, violent films for adults. Robert Bresson wasn't reckless with his audience's hearts and L'Argent is the grimmest movie I've ever seen.

I don't especially want my son to read The Giving Tree either, though. Even if it's a more successful version of the standard Pixar story, I don't need him feeling bad about his relationship with me. Even if the Pixar model was more true, if Elemental was applicable to your life and not a metaphor for race that's actually deeply racist (Just checking, can you touch people of other races or does it cause you physical pain because their bodies destroy yours on contact?), we don't need to hit kids with everything the world can do to them. There's no reason for the dad dinosaur to die in a flood in The Good Dinosaur. There's no reason for Nemo's mom and siblings to get eaten in Finding Nemo. There are story reasons-- it's a cheap way to make the audience understand why Nemo's dad would be so nervous about the outside world-- but what kid needs to see a self-aware fish and her hundreds of eggs get wiped out? Kids either know people die or don't need to learn it from a Pixar film about a silly and forgetful fish.

Over the weekend, I watched the very good documentary Butterfly in the Sky, about Reading Rainbow. Toward the end of that show's run, LeVar Burton met with an elementary school class who were at the school closest to the World Trade Center when the towers fell in 2001. He spoke with a moving level of care. He listened to what they had to say. They worked together on a song that expressed how they felt. That's valuable. That's taking something sad beyond belief and working toward a place of understanding. I'd let my child watch that. I just don't need him to get sucker-punched by art. I don't need him to know how Up's Carl feels when his wife dies, as good as I think that film is. Has anybody ever been comforted by that? Has Up led to anybody of any age understanding their own partner's death in a more complete way? When all of the toys are trapped on a conveyer belt to complete destruction in Toy Story 3, has anybody watching ever thought "Wow, I now see how hard it would be to ride a moving platform to a furnace, thinking I'm going to melt with everybody I love?"

It's useless. It doesn't go anywhere, lead to anything, give you any further hold into any of your feelings. And it wouldn't matter, but that's nearly every Pixar film. They're making good work and then they're trying to make you cry, as if that's the most important thing a movie can do. I enjoy sad movies. I rewatched Fire of Love a few weeks ago and it wrecked me just as thoroughly as it had the first time. I'll watch it again. Like you, my parents hear about the films I love and ask why I only like depressing movies. A Bresson film or Fire of Love or any number of sad movies isn't expressly trying to make me sad, though. They aren't overindulgent in that way. They aren't trauma porn.

Pixar's work has problems besides Making Up A Thing To Be Sad About, of course. You'll never see a movie that hates fat people more than WALL-E does. Austin Powers 2 doesn't hate fat people as much as WALL-E does. Pre-teen schoolyard bullies at elite private schools in moneyed American suburbs don't hate fat people that much. Ratatouille posits “anybody can be an artist” and then reveals it actually meant “not anybody can be a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere,” continuing writer-director Brad Bird's regressive Libertarian weirdness from The Incredibles, where he chastised a world that would try to put restrictions on society's elite. I’ll stand in front of anybody and argue until I pass out that anybody can be a great artist. I can't imagine what anybody involved in Ratatouille thought they were accomplishing by arguing that everybody isn't capable of making great art. Your stated thesis may as well be "It's possible you suck, but somebody else doesn't."

That's to say nothing of the studio telling these stories. On a basic level, if you want to really break the first Toy Story entry down to its skeleton, it's become a true case of "do as I say, not as I do;" it's about a guy at the top recognizing he isn't at the top anymore and maturing to the point where he can be okay with that. Other people get to shine.

And yet! Pixar was co-founded by Toy Story's executive producer, Steve Jobs, an egomaniac who took credit for everybody's work and stabbed his coworkers and friends in the back on his way to creating one of the weirdest cults of personality of my lifetime. Co-lead Tim Allen has spent the past few years hitting the cancel culture button, complaining that being a conservative in Hollywood is like being a Jew in Nazi Germany. He repeated that on Jimmy Kimmel in 2017! The first of Toy Story's five credited screenwriters is Joss Whedon, who ran his shows and movie sets like a total asshole, if everything we've heard from the actors on those sets is true. Director John Lasseter, already the creative center of Pixar, went on to be the creative center of all Disney animation and was kicked out for making women so uncomfortable. Pixar hired handlers to follow him around and make sure he didn't grope women. Think about how bad things had to be for Disney to fire somebody with that much power. That's four creepy jerks above the line.

In 2024, well after Lasseter has been exiled (to producing animated films for Apple and Netflix, the poor wastrel), Pixar hasn't become any more equitable an environment for its talent. Its animators are not unionized and if a few of the main characters in Inside Out 2 sound off, it's because Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling left the project and were replaced after Pixar decided they deserved to make 2% of their costar Amy Poehler's salary. On April 21, the company announced it had laid off 14% of its workforce. That's 175 people. In 2023, they laid off 75. Great job, everybody.

There's been forward movement. As I said, the end of Toy Story 4 breaks from the series' other faults by giving its main character a desire for adventure larger than his desire to cling to kids who don't know he's alive. Turning Red is a masterpiece of expressing the stakes, perceived or otherwise, of being a young teenager with uncontrollable hormones. Luca and Coco are beautiful and Coco is all about death-- it would be so easy for that film to tip into Pixar Trauma Porn, but it never gets close.

Maybe it's all a result of runaway success in a medium that encourages sequelization and a mass of product. Think about Toy Story like Die Hard. There are five Die Hard movies, two of them great, and if Die Hard was one film, it would be about the most eventful night in a pretty normal guy’s life. Taken as a full series, it’s about the unluckiest man alive, who gets wrapped up in a major terrorist attack every few years. They’re fun action movies, though, and they don’t have much continuity, so we let it slide. It’s also easy to do this because, again, three of the films are not great. They are very bad movies. So you don’t revisit them.

Toy Story‘s continuity is more cohesive, even if the universe’s rules have holes. It's full of call-backs and replacements for voice actors who died in real life. It’s always been the same characters under the control of roughly the same company of creatives. If you keep creating these conflicts for the toys for decades, you’re communicating that to be a toy is to experience a few years of happiness and then a crushing eternity of loneliness. This is not me reading too far into things: Jessie’s whole arc in the second film is based on not wanting to spend her immortal life in storage. She is afraid of living forever in solitary confinement. There are Lovecraft stories with endings less bleak than that. The Greek myth of Prometheus sees that character tied to a rock, having his regenerating liver pecked out by an eagle every day. Toy Story 3 ends with Lotso Huggin' Bear strapped to a truck's grill, preparing to spend his eternal life having pieces of himself torn off.

Everything works out for the main toys in Toy Story 3, but the emotional drain is terrible. They have their Stalag 17 adventure and escape to happiness, but the movie has just spent 90 minutes and two prequel movies telling us that this happiness is fleeting and that abandonment is always around the corner. When the story opens, every background character from the past two films has already been abandoned. Again, the movie points this out. I am not reading too far into anything the movie didn't also read into.

If you keep making Toy Story movies, you expose an uncomfortably sad and dark world in what started as a fun adventure. I love these movies. They're funny and they make me feel terrible. If there were a couple Toy Story films, it might be better. Toy Story 3 is, for me, where it became impossible to ignore the fear of being unloved behind every character’s plastic eyeballs.

You get away from that by creating new worlds and putting new people in charge. And Pixar made Turning Red. But they're also releasing Inside Out 2. And as much as I liked the end of Toy Story 4, I know Toy Story 5 could go either way. It could go both at once. Baseline, it'll be expertly put together. Worst case scenario, it rips my heart out a dozen times in 90 minutes.