I know time is up to dust off a few gender-driven stereotypes. For that, "Frozen" was a landmark. But there's a fine line between creating new characters and promoting their differences and deconstructing old characters that belong to a whole other storyline in order to promote a difference, that's when I get the feeling that Disney is dangerously toying with its own legacy.
To make myself more specific, I would have no problem with a film centering on a gender exclusive romance and maybe that will be "Frozen II" novelty, but I would have a problem if they made a sequel to "The Fox and the Hound" in order to suggest that there was more than a friendship between Todd and Copper. Watching "Toy Story 4", I felt betrayed by the way the whole relationship between toys and owners, that took a trilogy to be built, was demystified in one single film to shine a light on Disney's 'new order'.
All the previous "Toy Story" movies had a specific story. The first was exploring the psychology of toys within their relationships with their owners. Anyone could relate to that, kids who own toys and adults who used to. It also sealed the friendship between Woody and Buzz, as two of Andy's favorites, not rivals. The second film established the issue of growing up through the Jessie situation and the impeding doom of hormone-driven rejection. Still, Andy and Woody realized that they were not articles among others or valuable items to be worshiped, having ANDY written on their feet was their value and it was perfect while it lasted.
The trilogy ended with the perfect tone (and note), Andy, now grown-up, realizes that the sentimental value of his toys depend on their current utilization as much as their past, so he gives all the toys, including Woody, to Bonnie. For the first time, there's a voluntary separation between the partners, it's an end of era but also a new start. And the toys' "circle of life" has always been about children having toys not toys having children, the song wasn't "I've got a friend in you" after all. In that fourth opus, there's such an obsession with that notion of "having children" that it felt like they were procreating them. I'm not exaggerating, it's used so many times it became a whole overarching theme.
But I didn't have a problem with that because the film started with a rather touching scene. Feeling rejected by Bonnie, Woody follows her in her first day at school and helps her create a new toy, "Forky", I just loved the way the "Spork" came alive on the sole basis that he was considered a toy, and the way Woody felt responsible in a fatherly that wasn't totally out of place in the film's context. Because the motive was still Bonnie: he didn't want her to lose her new toy, Woody was still thinking of his owner, and that's the way all toys behaved, not because that's the way it should be, but because that's the way it was established as soon as the series began.
This is why I just hated the way Woody admitted at the end that he did that because he had nothing else to do, as if toys were supposed to have an existence of their own, and being a lost toy was an option. Woody cared for Bonnie and Forky and it was out of character to describe this as a weakness. But the film constantly shows Woody as a weak character, both morally and physically, and for that, the studios came up with the right contrast: Bo Peep who is of course the incarnation of the Disney heroine, she's brave, bad-ass, perfect, not one ounce of vulnerability and nothing is impossible to her. Meanwhile, Jessie was relegated to a tertiary character while she could have been the female lead after all.
The character of Gabby Gabby was a great addition though, acting like a Disney villain (especially with her scary minions-automatons) but displaying a hidden depth that broke my heart. That Gabby had the potential, but Bo was such a caricature that I could hear the marketing strategy behind her creation "let her awesomeness put Woody to shame" and she did a great job at that. Naturally, she's proud of not "having children" which seems to associate parenting with a form of commitment a girl should be proud to reject. Quite hypocritical from a studio whose main audiences aren't seniors.
Now, maybe I'm overanalyzing, but when you also have two toys who insist on "having children" since they've been "waiting for three years" and they're males, it's of course a nod to the right for adoption, which draws the obvious parallel between belonging to children and having children. Which says in subtext, women shouldn't make raising families a priority but it's clearly one for those who've been denied this right. The message isn't wrong but just off-topic in the context of a series where a/ toys have always been the possessed ones not the possessors, b/ when the possession was a mark of friendship and nothing else and c/ when viewers could relate to owners, even from the toys' perspective. By over-humanizing them to make them timely relevant, something of the series' charm was lost.
My view is rather conservative but only in the sense that I wished the spirit of "Toy Story" to be conserved the way it was in the first three films, I enjoy a progressive film like anyone, but I wish Disney could do that with new characters, not with series whose arcs were perfectly closed. But I think I see where they're coming from, they're probably preparing a spin-off prequel that will center on Bo Peep, so maybe "Toy Story 4" is only a vehicle for her. Ironic that in the film, it's a skunk.
