Quoted By:
>The Toy Story franchise is the closest thing we have to an undisputed national anthem, a popular belief that celebrates what we think we all stand for — cooperation, ingenuity, and simple values, such as perpetual hope. This fact of our infantile, desensitized culture became apparent back in 2010 when I took a knee on Toy Story 3 and Rotten Tomatoes sprouted death threats — as if I had made Ilhan Omar–style comments against the history of America and its institutions.
>That mob-like mania is depicted during a fairly creepy sequence in Toy Story 4 when cowboy doll Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) explores an antiques-and-consignment store and is threatened by a menacing phalanx of lookalike, thinkalike, actalike Pee-wee Herman dolls. It’s a Pixar vision of a high-tech lynching, but this mad dash by revengeful analog gadgets also, inadvertently, symbolizes the conformity that has taken over amusement culture: The Toy Story franchise proves that movies (especially from Disney and Pixar) are produced to be critic-proof.
>My heretical point, when writing about Toy Story 3, was that this insulting franchise delimited movies — particularly those targeted at children — as no longer expressive art but mere products synonymous with toys and the utility of toys: All reflection and imagination is left to the manufacturer. There’s nothing for the viewer to do but worship the formula.
How can one critic be so based?
