I had the kids today, so to entertain them we first went to REI for them to play in the tree house, and then after a lunch of ham and cheese, we went to the Majestic Bay cinema in Ballard to watch Toy Story 4.
The last time I went with the girls to the cinema was to watch Ferdinand, a year and a half ago, and La Serpiente wept with fear almost all the way through. With Toy Story 4,she watched open mouthed, entranced until a few minutes from the end, when the patent Pixar emltional-knife-to-the-guts was unleashed.
I really didn’t feel a fourth Toy Story was necessary. The fact that the fourth spends the first half hour apparently playing suicide for laughs (there’s a toy that keeps trying to throw itself into a bin, to the hilarity of the audience) didn’t do much to arrest this notion.
On the positive side, there’s a cameo from a Canadian action toy that is voiced by Keanu Reeves. But the plot is wesker than Toy Story 3 (and. An you remember Toy Story 2 now?) There’s great animation, but the story itself doesn’t feel to me like it has much of a heart. Yes, it does all it needs to, but when even my six year old can see it’s setting itself up for a fifth episode, there is no soul to this beast.
Destroyer watched the whole film without complaining, but then she also ate a kilo of popcorn and wanted to watch the Frozen 2 trailer over and over. La Serpiente was also fine until that heartbreaking sob from her five minutes from the end, when I looked to see her eyes brimming with tears as two toys said their final goodbyes. I thought that was something she had no concept of, until I remembered she’s left all her friends from school half a world away. And popcorn doesn’t help that.