Toy Story 4

I guess there’s a reason why they usually stop movie series at three entries. It becomes impossible to not experience, when watching a fourth installment of a franchise, a sense that you’ve seen all this stuff before—that you are looking at a paper or a picture that has been copied a few times too many, or copied from a copy of a copy. That’s the sense I got watching this film. The familiar characters are there, a somewhat familiar storyline is there—this series has done both new character introductions and finding a long-lost friend in prior sequels—but at this point they just don’t have the same impact as they originally did. Not surprising, really; it requires a ton of fresh creative input to keep old characters and scenarios feeling even relatively fresh, and there just isn’t a lot of vibe that the studio was up to that challenge here. Thus, it was not a surprise that my attention started to wander long before this flick reached its climax, let alone the potentially series-altering denouement. I know they’re planning yet another sequel for this series—perhaps without Hanks, though that issue probably wouldn’t be insurmountable—but I suspect the only thing that will come of the attempt will be further proof of Disney’s current creative bankruptcy. Oh, I suppose I should note that the uncritical among us—like children, the target audience here—will absorb this outing with the same level of pleasure the first three provided. But for the rest of us, I think we should expect a bit more for our time and attention. It just might be time to put away these childish things.