Good God, the Trailer for ‘Toy Story 4’ Is Just Unbelievably Depressing
March 19, 2019I can watch the sizzle reel of Big Sad Moments from Pixar movies in my head like I'm seeing them in real time: The beginning sequence in Up, Bing Bong sacrificing himself in Inside Out, the few seconds when Wall-E doesn't recognize Eva after she rebuilds him, literally the entirety of Coco. I mean, just look at this shit:
I am legitimately crying right now. Cool, cool, very cool.
Anyways, no franchise does Big Sad better than Toy Story, a series that's about making a child happy and then inevitably being tossed aside by the person you love the most in this world when they grow up. Honestly, I can barely fuck with these movies at this point. They're that bleak.
Well, the official trailer for Toy Story 4 came out Tuesday, and this thing is, somehow, shaping up to be even sadder than the first three.
Let's begin here. Fuck:
Toy Story 4 is about Forky, a doll some kid made out of a spork and thereby blessed with the gift of life. Unfortunately, Forky is very, very sad right out of the gate, afflicted by a devastating combination of existential dread and crippling self-doubt.
"Why am I alive?" he asks Woody in the trailer, like some kind of tiny, plastic Nietzsche. "I am not a toy. I was made for soup, salad, maybe chili, and then the trash." He then literally defenestrates himself, so, yeah: pretty fucking bleak.
This child is either crying or otherwise visibly devastated during, like, 90 percent of her appearances in this trailer. Pixar... why have you done this.
T-rex's arms are too short to ever be able to hug anyone. He is incapable of the most basic expression of affection there is. If that's not sad, I don't know what is.
Being an adult is basically like being an abandoned toy, isn't it? It's about realizing you're a speck on an incomprehensibly giant planet that doesn't care about you, doesn't cater to your emotional wellbeing in any way, and seems hellbent only on making you miserable. It's that sense of compounding loss—a series of raw memories rendered inaccessible, an understanding of how the joy of making friends always yields to the bitterness of losing friends, or else, the glacially slow drift you make away from someone that's almost imperceptible until you see a photo of them on—oh, shit, I'm sorry, I got a little carried away there. This trailer is just a lot.
Case in point:
Look at these eyes. Look at the pain behind these eyes. Woody looks like a man who stubbed his toe, looked at his checking account and saw $16 in it, got dumped, and then found out his father died. Please—somebody, anybody—help.
Oh good, Andy is back, the boy who betrayed our extremely dejected heroes when he grew up and disappeared from their lives forever. Thank you, Pixar, for this uplifting flashback.
Silhouettes? Check. Rain? Check. A hand placed on a chin, a tender gesture that unmistakably signifies "I am sorry you are crushingly depressed right now, and I will tell you that things are going to get better, but honestly, man, I'm not sure?" Check. How is this a movie for children?
And then, an entire box of tissues later, at long last, the trailer is over:
Thank god for that. Time to schedule an extra appointment with my therapist!!!!!!!! But yeah, Toy Story 4 everybody! Get psyched! It comes out on June 21!
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