Sorry, but the Toy Story toys can actually die
It’s 2020. Of course the cute talking toys you love from those animated movies can die. Stop asking if things can be worse because they can and will be worse. All the bad things can happen and are happening right now, including the revelation that Buzz and Woody and the rest of the Toy Story gang possess the same fickle and flimsy mortality as everyone else. This news comes to us from Twitter, the actual Bad Place, where Toy Story 3 director and noted sadist Lee Unkrich—whose optimism, like ours, has been completely eviscerated in quarantine—confirmed the very worst fears of every person who’s seen a Toy Story: Those toys can fucking DIE, man.
Over the weekend, a Twitter user who goes by the name of “mustard clown” (tell me more) tweeted that he and his girlfriend were having an argument over the mortality of the toys in Toy Story. “mustard clown” says he thinks they’re immortal, while his girlfriend (ketchup… puppet?) thinks they can die. The question sparked an interesting conversation in which Twitter users ruminated on horrific existential concepts like what happens when you dismember a toy, or if you take two of them apart and fuse them together—like Sid did in the first Toy Story. Some users posited a terrifying reality in which the toys can undergo traumatic physical transformations and feel pain, but are ultimately immortal, so even if you melted one a whole bunch, it still has a soul but it just can’t move around anymore. Or something.
This is where Unkrich comes in. He’s an authority on the subject, given that he directed Toy Story 3—which features a climactic scene where the toys come face to face with a trash incinerator. Buzz and Woody, et al., are visibly terrified, signaling to the audience that, oh shit, these guys MIGHT ACTUALLY DIE?!!??! Turns out those fears are very much founded:
So what Lee Unkrich is saying here is that anyone with the right attitude and a little elbow grease could kill a toy, if they tried hard enough and really wanted it. America!