I went and saw Toy Story 4 over the weekend, and despite it being the fourth entry in a series I thought had found its perfect ending in Toy Story 3, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the movie was actually pretty decent.
To give you a quick spoiler-free breakdown, the movie revolves around self-sacrifice, letting go, and never giving up, all with Woody as the main character. All of your favorites return, but don’t expect too much out of them, including Buzz Lightyear. This movie revolves around Woody, his reunion with Bo Peep, and their hapless and hilarious ward, a spork named “Forky.” It’s a heartwarming tale with laugh out loud comedic moments that even had sad moments where I had to tell myself I was a grown man who didn’t need to feel emotions during a kid’s movie.
I swear, Pixar is too good at tugging your heartstrings, and ever since Up, I always go into their movies ready to fight a battle of the feels.
Like all good things that happen, you can definitely expect that the unpleasable among us would be displeased. The social justice warriors have seen the movie, too, and, as you may have guessed, they’re angry about it.
Stella Duffy of BBC Radio’s Saturday Review program said she’s not pleased about the fact that Toy Story 4 didn’t take the opportunity to give more representation to minorities. She’s also angry about the fact that the movie was “ableist,” and somehow looks down on those with disabilities:
I’m the Grinch who hated it. Seriously, it’s 2019! What on Earth are Disney doing having a film that has no leads that are black characters.
Yes, there are black actors, but they are yellow and they are green and they are plush! How can they possibly think that it’s alright now?
Yeah, maybe in 1995 – which was also wrong then, as well, actually – but now, to be serious, where every single humanoid toy, is white? It’s just shocking!
She also stomped her feet over the display of Bo-Peep, who more or less replaces Buzz Lightyear as the action hero within the film. Duffy’s problem seemed to be that Bo-Peep was white and that she and Woody picked their romance back up. Also, she seemed angry that Bo-Peep can walk?:
Okay, let’s talk about the white feminism on display here. Oh look! Bo-Peep’s a feminist. No she’s not! She’s still going to fall in love, she’s still going to have the happily ever after, that’s not feminism!
It’s a woman who kicks off her skirt to reveal bloomers. Had a couple of thoughts… and does some high wire acts. And it’s disablist! It covers ALL bases! […]
It looks good – but Disney is supposed to LOOK good. There has to be content to the story too!
Unilad, who originally covered the story, said that asking Toy Story 4 to bear the brunt of all that activist messaging may be a bit unfair, but that it gives the listeners of the podcast a reason to pause and think.
No. No, it doesn’t.
This is a kids’ movie with pre-established characters who have pre-established relationships. Injecting a black toy into the movie just to inject a black toy into the movie isn’t a good story. It’s actually forced diversity in a movie, and as has been seen many times; it doesn’t make the movie any better.
What’s more, the story doesn’t revolve around the idea of diversity. That’s not the theme. The fact that every child’s movie has to revolve around some kind of social justice issue today makes the Hollywood press nearly unbearable to read and some movies completely unwatchable.
From a story standpoint, Toy Story 4 ties up a lot of loose ends and potentially starts a lot of new adventures, though I hope they end it here. It introduces the concept of letting go and moving on, which I think is a great cap. If all of the social justice issues and representations that SJWs wanted to be in the movie were present, there would have been no room left for the great story that we were given. It would feel awkward, badly paced, and pointless. It wouldn’t promote diversity, it would only turn people off to it.
But this is another example of why trying to please the social justice crowd is a lost cause. You can’t please unpleasable people. As I covered last year, even the movie Black Panther had SJWs up in arms because there wasn’t enough representation of the gay community.
The social justice warriors and hard-left need to understand that not everything is about them and that artists and creators are under no obligation to see to it that everything they create has some sort of mention about this group or that. A story about a high seas adventure shouldn’t have homosexual relationships between two transgender people of different races shoehorned in there in order to meet the approval of political busybodies.
Besides, they will just find something else to disapprove of anyway.
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