Review: Toy Story: Tale of Terror!

I’m not sure anyone was in a huge hurry to see more of Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the rest of the gang after their glorious send-off at the end of Toy Story 3 – not because we didn’t love them, but because… well, why mess with perfection? Why go back to the well and risk overexposure? Why compromise that utterly sublime ending?

I’ll get to Toy Story 4 in due course, in which many of these fears did in fact materialize, but the shorts and specials that were released between 2011 and 2014 were delectable little trifles that gave us more adventures of the toys without backtracking on any of the developments or characterizations of the movie trilogy. For now at least, I can continue raving about the continued success of the franchise.

This, plus the Christmas Special (Toy Story That Time Forgot) and three short films (Small Fry, Hawaiian Vacation and Partysaurus Rex) all work beautifully as a sort of coda to the trilogy, giving us glimpses into what is essentially the toys’ happy ending with Bonnie, the new owner who loves and cherishes them, and who they can protect and nurture in return. With that in mind, you can’t blame Pixar Studios for wanting to play a little longer in this particular sandpit.

I’ll get to the rest in good time, but for now, in honour of Halloween: Toy Story: Tale of Terror!

The special is a twenty-one minute film that was released on ABC in October 2013, which manages to pack enough ideas and gags and even character development into what could have filled a feature-length film. And it doesn’t stint on the budget either: all the voice actors are back, from Tom Hanks, Tim Allen and Joan Cusack, to the likes of Kristen Schaal and Timothy Dalton in considerably smaller roles (though the original denizens of Bonnie’s room are given far more space here than they were afforded in Toy Story 3), and the animation is as good as anything that appeared on the big screen.

But despite giving Trixie and Pricklepants a bit more focus, Tale of Terror! is for all intents and purposes Jessie’s story. Though it begins as an ensemble, she quickly moves to the forefront of the action, is forced to face her claustrophobia and fear of abandonment, and subsequently saves the day. A Jessie-centric story has been a long time coming, and a small part of me is annoyed that she only gets a television special in which to enjoy the limelight – but perhaps that’s a subject for another post.

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In many ways, it borrows plot elements from all three preceding films: the toys are nearly left behind in a strange place, an amoral businessman steals them for his own enrichment, and they manage to reach safety by enlisting the help of other toys in an elaborate escape attempt using everyday objects. (The only plotline missing is that of a toy who isn’t aware they’re a toy, but the Christmas special takes care of that one). Jessie even saves Woody from a transport vehicle in a direct role reversal from the climax of Toy Story 2.

What sets Tale of Terror! apart is the genre it builds itself upon, pushing the toys into what is (at least in the first half) a classic horror film, in which one of the participants is an extremely self-aware expert on the clichés that permeate the story: Mr Pricklepants spends the entire film narrating the flow of the story and the tropes that are bound to be put into effect: from the opening beats of watching a scary movie, to his final declaration that the credits are about to roll any second (and they do).

(As an aside, I love how Timothy Dalton’s IMDB page includes both James Bond and a furry little hedgehog called Mr Pricklepants).

Yet it all still exists within the realm of the toys’ specific worldview: the scurry to get back to their places, the fear of getting left behind, the logistics of small beings negotiating large spaces, the creativity inherent in how objects lying around can be repurposed as tools in the hands of toys (it’s a simple paperclip that saves the day) – the ultimate goal is to meld horror into a Toy Story setting; less a Halloween special than an Affectionate Parody of a slasher film starring Jessie, Woody and Buzz.

So when a mysterious something starts picking off the toys one by one, it manages to be genuinely unsettling before the eventual Reveal proves it to be something totally child-friendly, a tone and objective that’s inherent right from the opening shot of those distinctive white clouds transposed onto a black-and-white sky filled with rain and lightning, which is then revealed to be part of an old movie the toys are watching on a portable DVD player in the trunk of Bonnie’s car.

(Another aside: we’ve come a long way from the toys watching VCRs back in the nineties, and if this special was made today the technology would no doubt be updated again. I don’t have time right now, but an essay on how these toys adapt and change with the technology across the years, and how that might affect relationships with each other and the children they look after, could be fascinating).

The attention to detail in the Film Within a Film is amazing: it’s only onscreen for a few seconds, but is presented like a genuine old movie, filled with over-the-top acting and cheesy special-effects. The fake cat that’s thrown at the actress playing Betsy is my favourite part, though it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.

More importantly, the commentary provided by the toys as they watch it gives us immediate insight into their characters: Rex is terrified for Betsy, Woody offers encouragement, Buzz suggests survival tactics and Pricklepants starts his commentary on the nature of horror films.

It’s characterization that’ll last for the whole film, especially when it comes to Jessie. She’s not remotely afraid of the monster in the movie, but when a pothole sends her falling backwards into a toolbox that traps her inside, we get a glimpse at her overwhelming panic at being in an enclosed space – so we know what it will cost her when she willingly crawls into a box later on in the story…

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After a tire blows out on the road, Bonnie’s mother turns into a roadside motel that (along with a later scene that takes place in a shower) is clearly a nod to Psycho, though the more generalized horror movie traits come into effect when the toys leave Bonnie’s backpack and stupidly start to wander off, an activity that leads straight to the Ten Little Murder Victims trope when they start disappearing one by one.

Obviously no one actually dies, but the disappearances are fairly harrowing, and one suspects that Pricklepants’s cheerful ongoing commentary is partly to reassure a younger audience that everything’s under control.

The assailant turns out to be a pet iguana called Mr Jones that’s been trained to steal belongings from the guests and deposit them in a basket for the motel manager to sell on eBay. Interestingly, once this culprit is revealed about halfway through, the horror elements of the story are more or less over, and with the introduction of Combat Carl – who refers to himself in the third person, is stuck in hyper-survivalist mode, and is essentially a (very light) play on those stock American characters who go to Vietnam and come back a little crazy – the whole thing turns into a straightforward action/rescue adventure.

I had no idea whether Combat Carl was actually a real toy in America – it doesn’t seem to be the case; rather he’s based on G.I. Joe and was even featured way back in the first Toy Story as one of the toys that Sid blows up in his backyard. This Carl has a backstory that somehow manages to be funny and poignant: he got left behind in the motel by his owner Billy, whom he speaks of with the same amount of intensity you’d expect from a long-lost love, having never given up on the hope they’ll one day be reunited. (In my imagination Carl was forgotten years ago, and Billy has grown up already; it just has the vibe of that kind of tragedy).

But he becomes something of a mentor for Jessie, introducing her to his mantra: “Jessie never gives up, Jessie finds a way,” and sure enough, she learns something from his utilization of paperclips and take-charge attitude.

Along with her friends, Mr Jones has collected an array of stolen toys currently locked in a glass cabinet, and much like the even shorter film Small Fry, these toys exist mainly for the sake of existing. You get the sense there’s a folder of character ideas somewhere at Pixar Studios and this is their only chance to use it, dammit! That’s the curse of short films: despite being so rich in character potential we get so little time with the long-sighted Pez Dispenser, shapeshifting Lego Rabbit, miniature Combat Carl, and confused Transformer Expy (here called Transitron).

So Woody is quickly snapped up on eBay, and after he’s packaged and placed in a delivery truck it’s up to Jessie to rescue him – which she does, naturally, by facing her greatest fear: willingly getting into a sealed box so she can go after him, racing against the clock all the while considering Bonnie is about to leave. Having escaped from the box, fighting off the iguana, and using the Chekhov’s Gun of Mr Potato Head’s hand to pull back the curtain and reveal the motel manager’s scheme to Bonnie and her mother, Jessie saves the day.

So all’s well that ends well: Bonnie’s toys are back in the car, Combat Carl and his cohorts hitch a ride on the delivery truck (I hope they make it to Billy’s house, though I doubt we’ll ever know) and comeuppance is served when the motel manager panics at the sight of two highway cops and tries to make a run for it… in their vehicle. That one’s a little weird, but hey.

Miscellaneous Observations:

There’s some cute Buzz/Jessie shipping fuel throughout this, including his obvious protectiveness of her when she gets scared. I don’t really ship anything in this franchise (they’re… um… toys) but it’s cute.

The gravestone that Betsy stumbles over in the opening movie has the name Simon J. Paladino etched on it, which is apparently the name of Posthumous Character Gazerbeam from The Incredibles. I… don’t know what we’re meant to do with this information.

When Bonnie first enters the motel she constantly rings the bell at the till, which is cute for two reasons: first because that’s exactly what kids do (I can attest to that working in a public library) and secondly because the iguana also uses one to call attention to the stuff he’s stolen. That children, is seeding and payoff. It works for the little things as well as the big ones.

Buzz’s glow in the dark armour comes in handy for perhaps the second time in the franchise’s history, though the laser on his wrist remains pretty useless.

At one point Mr Potato Head’s disembodied hand points the way, once again raising questions about how much sentience exists in a separated part of a toy’s anatomy. Don’t think about it too hard, though someone at the AV Club certainly overthought the nature of Lego:

I'm incredibly interested in how Lego bricks work in the Toy Story universe. Here we had a character called Lego Rabbit, who could rearrange into any permutation of its component pieces at will. However, it corresponds with no official Lego set, so I have to wonder whether its intelligence comes from being a rabbit, or whether all Lego bricks have a hive mind. If that's the case, there's nothing to keep them in discrete units like a rabbit or a car, unless there's some psychological block (lol) inside their mentality that makes them consider themselves discrete whenever their owner declares them partitioned off into a separate creation.

If all bricks in the local area can in fact combine together, that could make for a very interesting piece of animation. My Lego bricks weigh close to sixty pounds in total, and currently occupy over seventy gallons of storage space, and by AFOL standards I'm a small-time collector. A Toy Story short set near a concentration of bricks like that (especially if they were malicious) would be fascinating to watch.

Ah, the questions this franchise raises…

I truly believe that Joan Cusack deserves some sort of award for her delivery of the line: “Are… you… Combat Carl?” but the best scene is definitely the Smash Cut that occurs between Woody, Jessie and Buzz silently reacting to Rex’s disappearance and their screaming panic as they desperately run for it.

There’s some nice continuity at work when it comes to how quickly Woody and Jessie are bought on eBay, and for very exorbitant prices. Can we assume Al was the buyer?

Remember that Hope Spot in Toy Story 2 in which the audience is briefly lulled into thinking Woody and Jessie have more time to get off the plane when one of the airport porters tells the other that there’s more luggage coming – only for the second guy to say: “too late, put them on the next one,” and slam the door shut? They do the same thing here, when the delivery girl says: “looks like I’ll have to take two trips” …and then grabs Woody’s box anyway. Hey, if it works, it works.

On researching this short film, I came across this jokey PSA starring Combat Carl which is astonishingly timely.

That was Toy Story: Tale of Terror! I’ll return to this project at Christmastime with Toy Story That Time Forgot – just as this special gave Jessie some well-deserved screen-time, the Christmas special focuses on Trixie, and manages to similarly pack itself full of ideas and creativity. You could fairly say that about all the Toy Story features, so even though there’s little to do but gush about how good they are, it feels good to feel enthusiastic about something for a change.