One Small Step for a Toy: Buzz Lightyear and Woody
'Toy Story' undoes a lifetime of 'Velveteen Rabbit' neurosis
By Richard von Busack
Do you remember that hideous story about the Velveteen Rabbit? Take it from an ex-6-year-old, this is the last book you want to read your child! It's all about how your toys come to life when you're out of the room.
A thoughtless little boy neglects his stuffed rabbit, tossing it aside when it's old and gnarly-looking in favor of a new bunny. The Velveteen Rabbit (Our Hero), disfigured and moldy from sleeping in a kid's bed for years, pines away nobly like a discarded lover, happy in the knowledge that if he's a really, really good bunny, he'll get to be alive. (I know your nostrils are flaring at the scent of a Christian allegory.)
Oh, but the rabbit hasn't been through the mill race completely. The little boy gets scarlet fever and--in one of those great moments of Victorian praxis--they decide all of his toys are infected and have to be burned! Starting with you-know-who. In the last scene, a live rabbit with same markings of the Velveteen Rabbit crosses the garden within the view of the convalescing little boy, seeking bloody revenge before the gardener kills it with a shovel.
Admittedly, when Meryl Streep reads it, she leaves out the part about the revenge, the gardener and the shovel (probably because I just made it up), but such is the grim power of this mind-roasting tale of horror that it took me ten years to be certain that inanimate objects didn't have feelings that could be hurt, thanks to the cursed Velveteen Rabbit.
So, after complaining for years about Disney stripping the mythical qualities out of kids' stories, I have to double back and say that Toy Story is funny, enchanting and refreshingly low-key. Sibling rivalry, not human-toy angst, provides the undercurrent in this story of mutiny in the bedroom.
Woody, a cowboy doll, is displaced by a vainglorious space-explorer action figure named Lightyear, who's under the delusion that he's actually marooned on a hostile planet. (In best Shatner tones, Lightyear dresses down Woody for even suggesting they're toys: "You are a sad, sick, little man.") There's more peril, embodied by the stinky little kid next door who likes to blow up toys with firecrackers.
The characterizations are as fussed over as the adventures; there is an ingenious chase sequence; and the repartee among the toys is quite amusing--"Where ya from? Singapore? Taiwan?" The all-Pixar animation strips the grisliness out of the concept of talking toys (until it's brought back as a fine joke for the punch line/moral). Thanks to Toy Story, even if your toys are talking behind your back, at least you know they're not saying anything they wouldn't want you to hear.
Toy Story (G; 87 min.), directed by John Lasseter, written by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow, and with the voices of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen.
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From the Nov. 22-Nov. 29, 1995 issue of Metro
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