They called it Disney’s Folly. They thought the film—produced in the depths of the Depression on an unprecedented 1.5 million dollar budget—would ruin the company.

But folly is an interesting word. Trace it back in time, and it turns black and strange. Folie, in Old French, means madness^[1]Disney comes to us from French, too. Disney = D’Isigny = “From Insigny.”. Venture even further back, and it gains connotations of wickedness, sin, and lewdness. Disney’s Crime.

He got away with it. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the most important animated movie ever made. It’s like Marquis de Sade’s Justine or Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue—hard to appraise as good or bad because of its singularity. Nothing like Snow White exists before it. Everything made afterward lies in its shadow. It was the first feature-length cel-animated film, and purely on a technical level, it’s a masterclass. The opening truck-in shot of the castle uses the studio’s new multiplane camera to evoke a sense of sky-devouring depth. Snow White is rotoscoped from live-action footage, which lets her interact believably with a rope, a bucket of water, and a door. Skirts and curtains swish convincingly. The sense of physics is bang-on accurate. It’s loaded with little “how did they do that?” moments, like when Snow White stares into a well and ripples play across her reflection.

The start of the film is jokeless. You are not supposed to laugh. That’s another area where Snow White broke the mold: it told a slow-paced romantic drama at a time when animation meant Koko the Clown and Felix the Cat. It was an audacious reimagination of form: almost like a three hundred million dollar, 90-minute long Tiktok. Disney spent big money on an artistic risk.

But there was a strategy to the movie, too. Walt viewed cartoon shorts as a financial dead end, and was probably right. Shorts were lashed to the mast of feature-length movies and had to share their profits: Disney could conceivably spend tens of thousands of dollars animating a short only to get stuck on the same bill as a box office turkey and never earn back the money. The only way to make this work was to turn out shorts as cheaply as possible, which Walt resented. By the mid 30s, the film market was glutted with animated content, and though Walt lived decades before Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne came up with Blue Ocean Strategy, he grasped its main insight: don’t compete; differentiate. By continuing to make shorts, he would be racing Warner Bros, MGM, Van Beuren Studios, Terrytoons, and Fleischer Studios to the bottom. But nobody else was making animated feature films, so he’d only be competing with himself.

Yet it’s still an odd film. It still feels like it shouldn’t work. Urban legends flower from this film’s remains: I still occasionally hear the one about how the dwarves are named after the stages of cocaine abuse. That sounds stupid, but the movie shunts your mind down strange pathways. Like Wizard of Oz, its stagey cuteness feels like a disguise that might drop at any minute.

You might remember the scary scenes, and how horrible they seemed when you were a little kid. The explosive and kinetic chase through the forest (even though nobody’s chasing her!) brings claustrophobic panic to your chest. The queen’s transformation scene is directed like a Hammer horror film. The interior shots of her dungeons have the luxuriant filth-texture of nightmares. It has moments of surrealist whimsy, yet there’s a heartbeat of German Expressionism pulsing through it.

That’s one half of the film. The other half consists of singing dwarves and twittering birds and gag-based slapabout comedy driven by the Roy Atwell, Pinto Colvig, and Eddie Collins characters. As soon as Snow White arrives at the cottage, the movie enters a thirty-minute stretch of downtime where the dwarves fool around and nothing much happens. Even the animation style changes: when the dwarves wash their hands for supper, they do so in generic blue cartoony water. This sequence feels like a couple of animated funny shorts strung together.

Snow White is a complicated movie to analyze. It innovates, but also contains reprises of everything that had made Disney successful up to that point. From one angle, the movie is a radical experiment; from another, it hedges its bets.

I’ve come to like the dwarves and animals, even though they’re pointless to the plot. They’re like flowers growing up a tree—they don’t structurally support the tree at all, but the world is better when flowers grow. The dwarf stuff is the soul of the film. You could cut it all out and never know it was gone, but you wouldn’t want to: it’s an oasis of chaotic energy in a film that’s otherwise pretty staid.

Snow White takes a famous story and plants it with ramrod straightness into your forebrain. Essentially, Snow White escapes from her stepmother, who is trying to kill her. She finds refuge with some very small men, is laid low by her stepmother’s poison, and then a prince restores her to life with love’s first kiss. All the human characters (save the stepmother) are stiff and starched down, both in their designs and expressiveness. Walt Disney discovered the same thing everyone from Max Fleischer to Ralph Bakshi would later discover: rotoscoping adds realism, but kills spontaneity and emotion. Snow White dies…but, for me, this moment lacks sting, because she never seemed fully alive to begin with.

(Realism is absolutely a mixed blessing in animation, which draws its appeal from the fact that it’s not realistic. John Kricfalusi used to bitch about this on his blog. “Who cares if the water in an animated movie is photorealistic? I can see photorealistic water any time I want by running by kitchen sink.” I don’t entirely agree with this—technique is good, and craft is good—but I partly agree. At a certain point in the quest for realism, shouldn’t you just be shooting in live action?)

The dwarves are lively enough to compensate for the stiff-seeming humans (and are characterized far better than they have to be), but even they are archetypes, not characters, and the story is made of tropes, not events. You can ask lots of hard questions about the movie, such as how the prince knew where to find her, or how the dwarfs fashioned a complex glass display case, but ultimately, the answer is always “because he wouldn’t be the prince otherwise, and they wouldn’t be the dwarves”. Everyone has some essential Platonic nature that they have no choice but to fulfil.

This is exemplified in the stepmother (who everyone agrees is the best part of the movie, a dry run for Maleficent). At the start, she’s a queen. But this makes her risky, failure-prone plan to poison Snow White nonsensical. Can she just snap her fingers and have Snow White arrested on whatever grounds she likes? Why get personally involved? Well, once she drank the magic potion, her nature changed. She’s no longer the queen, with a kingdom. She’s now a witch, forced to rely on “eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog.” You can’t be both a queen and a witch, in a story like this. You can only be one at a time. That’s fairy tale logic. Snow White owes many debts to the past: the question is whether the past wants those debts on its ledger books. Was Disney suitably respectful to the tale? Did he get away with his crime?

To answer that, it’s worth discussing where Snow White came from.

The answer, approximately, is “Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm”, who published the story in 1812 as Sneewittchen. It’s often asserted that the Grimm brothers “transcribed” fairytales. That’s not quite right. They bred them, like Mendel and his peas. First they collected samples (at least seventy-five different versions of Sneewittchen exist), selected their favorites, combined different elements from different stories, and sometimes wrote new scenes out of whole cloth. They shamelessly altered the contents of their stories to suit reader tastes. They changed rapes into kisses; lustmord into passionless, offscreen death. In other words, they did similar things to Disney. Don’t regard the Grimm brothers as cool OG gangstas and Walt Disney as Vanilla Ice rapping lamely about harpoons and bacon. They lived a century apart, but were more alike than different.

Snow White (in many pre-1812 accounts) is taken off to be killed by her mother. This evidently disagreed with Wilhelm and Jacob’s stout Volkish piety (“Honor your father and your mother“—Exodus 20:12), and they altered the tale so the queen was Snow White’s stepmother. This was sanitization. Nobody likes the idea that a monster could be your mother. It’s better for the evil to come from “outside the house”. (I believe a similar process happened in Hansel and Gretel, whose mother at least has a more sympathetic motivation than Snow White’s).

The Grimm brothers excised any trace of local history. For example, the idea (promoted by historian Eckhard Sander in Schneewittchen: Märchen oder Wahrheit, published in 1994 by Wartberg Verlag) that Snow White is a fictional cipher for 16th century Countess Margaretha von Waldeck (who died in 1554, of poison, perhaps), and that the “dwarves” were actually army of child slaves who toiled underground in her father’s mines near Bergfreiheit.

Jacob and Wilhelm were aware that they were changing the stories. In the accompanying notes to Sneewittchen, they list all the variants they had found. In one of them, the queen has a male consort, who takes a distressing pederastic interest in Snow White (this version was memorably retold by Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber). In another, the queen’s “mirror” is a talking dog named Mirror!^[2]Grimm’s Household Tales, notes to tale 53 They would have defended themselves by saying that there never was a “definitive” Snow White: these were oral tales, huge thrashing stormclouds with no defined shape. A fairy tale, by definition, is told: they lash out in a slightly different direction every time the teller speaks it to life. What parts get thundered out in the tones of a Biblical prophet? What parts get mumbled quietly through? What parts get skipped entirely, because the teller thinks their audience is too young, too stupid, or too morally hidebound to hear them? These decisions don’t damage the tale, they are the tale. The way a story is told is indivisibly part of it.

Writing is a unique kind of telling, because locks the story down permanently, giving it a fixed shape. What’s the movie’s very first shot? A book opening. It’s a motif suggesting that this version, and no other, is the definitive reading. “Ah, now we’re getting the story as it really happened.”

…but the appearance of permanence is illusory. Paper is cheap. Writing a book doesn’t define a story forever, because someone else can just write another one. The next version of the story doesn’t replace the first, it exists independently from it. We end up with a multiplicity of babbling mouths fighting to be heard, each possessing either all the truth, or none of it.

Once, someone wrote a book where Santa Claus is gay and has a husband. The anger this provoked—“You ruined Santa!”—seemed odd to me. Is the imaginary character of Santa now gay forever, because one book depicts him so? Can only one portrayal of Santa exist at a time? No. The world has enough room for an infinity of stories. Disney did not “ruin” Snow White: he just made his own variant.

And even if he hadn’t done so, Snow White still would have changed with time. Every reader is different, and brings a different interpretation to the story. Older generations would have been horrified by a parent trying to murder you. Modern generations are horrified when a prince kisses a princess without her consent. We all bring our own baggage to the tale. In a sense, no child has ever directly read an actual fairy tale, except through a silt-like layer of their own modernist and postmodernist sensibilities (just like nobody has ever seen an actual dinosaur bone, only modern mud packed into the shape of one). I’d argue that the longest-lasting part of a fairytale isn’t the plot, its the cruelty. The classic format is “once upon a time…”, then events dark and horrible occur, and we finish on an insincere-sounding “…and they all lived happily ever after”. A fairytale offers comfort, then sticks a knife into the reader or listener when they’re most vulnerable. It’s a devastating trick that every child of every age is vulnerable to.

Beyond this, many fairytale are textually ambiguous. They’re also, to be blunt, uncomfortable. Many seem like naked accounts of manias and mental disorders and abuse: ideas that pre-modern people had little way of meeting, except on the grounds of myth and folklore. The stock Grimmsian figure of the “Unglückskind” (“child of bad luck”) could be read allegorically as childhood autism or ADHD. It’s easy to be split, banished into a kind of fairytale world. A single head injury can transform your perception of the world, so that you might as well be locked in Gothel’s tower. Sometimes a child is mad. Sometimes mom and dad are mad. Sometimes they both are. Fairy tales echo some of such ineffability of trauma: but they are also hopeful, because they redefine it in a way we can understand. It’s easy to justify changing an abusive mother into a stepmother, in that light. When you make that change, are you ruining the story, or improving it? There’s more than enough cruelty in the world. Do we also need our stories to be equally cruel?

Disney power-sanded off a lot of fairy tale ugliness, but it doesn’t really matter. Interesting fairy tales are so stark that even after you blunt their edges, you still feel where the edges should have gone. And you definitely do in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

And there’s still some delightfully fucked-up stuff that got added. Disney loved a good skull gag. I counted three separate times when a bug or a rat or something crawled out of a skull’s eye sockets. My favorite gag in the movie involves the skeleton in the dungeon, reaching for a water jug that’s just a little out of reach. You learn so much about the witch’s character from that scene. “Have a drink! Hahaha!”

But in an odd way, the light scenes act as elastic rubber bands to propel the dark scenes forward, so that they hit harder than they otherwise would have. What I’ve often felt is that Disney’s mannerly Protestantism makes their ugly moments even worse. Everyone accepts cruelty and evil from Loony Toons: when Elmer Fudd tries to shoot Bugs, well, that’s just how Clampett, Jones, Avery did things. But when Donald Duck puts a gun to his head and tries to blow his brains out, it feels real and shocking, because you don’t expect that from Disney. Only a conservative square can be genuinely outrageous.

I wonder what kids today think of movies like this. Have they been reprogrammed by CinemaSins to snicker and count plot holes, instead of meeting the film on its own ground? What emotions does it produce?

I watched Snow White when I was a stupid kid, and it left a deep impression on me for that reason. Thanks to the internet, stupid kids are a dying breed. Well, they’re still stupid—but it’s a different kind of stupid: precocious adult stupidity, children trying on ill-fitting masks of performant irony they learned from the internet. I structure my life so I hear as little of the thoughts of children as possible, and what I do hear dismays me. “Oh, right. You’re a twelve year old.”

I saw a video where a primary school teacher discussing what motivates the kids she sees in her classroom: cringe avoidance. Kids are now terrified of doing things considered “cringe”, or being called cringe, or fundamentally being cringe (as though it’s a rash you can get infected by), and arrange their entire personality and behavior around that goal.

This impacts how they view media, because being moved by art—opening your heart, and letting it scar you—is deeply cringe. This leaves movies in a weird place: they exist to be rejected. Kids watch scary movies so they can show they’re not scared. They watch sad movies and refuse to cry. They watch funny movies and intentionally don’t laugh. Always, they have to be better than the thing they’re watching.

I don’t think this movie would work for modern kids. They’d see it as an invitation to pour scorn and contempt on its millions of hand-painted cels and beautiful artwork and laborious performances. They are ocean promontories, and the movie is a wave crashing around them, leaving them unmoved and unchanged. Their identity is based around the slaughter of art and all it means. Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the least cringe one of all?

A certified “nu metal” horror movie, The House on Haunted Hill caused my hair to erupt in bleached tips, my pants to baggify themselves, and a 40 foot long wallet chain to explode out of my pocket, uncoiling like the weapon of a Mortal Kombat character. Suddenly, wounds were crawling through my skin. I try so hard and come so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter.

It’s pretty good, overall: a gimmicky but scare-packed film with creative VFX, and even inspiring hints that there may be a real, live human writing the script. I don’t remember much of the 1959 version (except it has Vincent Price), but I remembered lots of things from this one. The pencil through the neck. The theme park ride. The shit with the camera. The other, different shit with the zoetrope (the movie doesn’t trust you to know what that is, they call it an “Saturation Chamber” or something). The waterboarding part. The sheer volume of practical effects was enjoyable. The editing is great, and creates massive amounts of chaos from William Malone’s workmanlike direction. It uses that strobe-pulse fluttery-moth shot-through-a-spinning-fan trick you saw in Jacob’s Ladder, to the point where it becomes a fetish. Don’t watch this if you have epilepsy.

The design of The Darkness (the embodiment of the evil in the house, not the rock band) walks a fraught line between “mediocre late 90s CGI that hasn’t aged well” and “genuinely creative and unsettling”. That one shot where they map an animated texture over a 3D model looks terrible, like a videogame.

…but the more abstract Rorschach-blot design looks excellent.

Casting is, admittedly, not the movie’s strong suite. Geoffrey Rush plays a ludicrously hammy 1950s panto villain. Fun, but what’s the point of updating the movie into the 90s and then writing such an anachronistic character? Xenia Onatopp (or whoever plays his wife) is okay. The camera operator appears to think I really want to see down her dress. Unfortunately he is correct.

The rest of the actors are bland. You will not remember their names. If you deign insert them into your memory, it will be as Reporter Bitch, Camera Bitch, Eyebrows Man, Glasses Man, and Black Man in a Horror Movie (he actually lives to the end. They should award him the Purple Heart for that. He gets characterized as a professional basketball player…one of those NBA pros who’s 1.78m tall, I guess.) Holy boring. Where do they find these people? Were they shipped to the film studio in a packing crate from Boring Actors Inc? They should have ripped the crate apart, painted terrified faces on the wooden planks themselves, and used those in the movie instead. It would have afforded us the illusion of more lively and charismatic actors.

Overall, there’s a lot of great moments here to offset the 90s cheese. I was surprised by how well the film held up.

I did notice some thematic elements that sailed over my head when I was 12, like the Scientology angle. It’s one of the most cartoonishly anti-psychiatry horror movies I’ve ever seen (“Electroshock therapy. Dr Vanacutt liked to zap his patients in multiples of eighteen. More energy efficient.”). Or the moment when Evelyn says (referring to her husband) “His initials are S.P.”

That might also explain this lengthy monologue by Ali Larter’s character, when she attempts to defeat the Darkness using the science of Dianetics.

I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist and it is something that you have to earn. Being a Scientologist, you look at somebody and you know absolutely that you can help them. Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it’s not like anyone else. As you drive past, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you’re the only one that can really help. That’s…that’s what drives me, is that I know we have an opportunity, and uh, to really help for the first time effectively change people’s lives, and uh, I’m dedicated to that. I’m gonna, I’m absolutely, uncompromisingly dedicated to that. We are the authorities in getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind.

I found that a little heavy-handed, but your mileage may vary.

Also, I am pretty sure I reviewed this movie already. Oops.

Are they leaning into the “Pixar mom” meme at this point? I only ask because Little Bo Peep has a dump truck four times as big as the rest of her body.

Anyway, it’s another Pixar movie starring toys and crap. All your favorites are here, and they’ve never looked better. The animation is just stupendous. Look at that god damn rain at the beginning—relax, guys. I kind of feel like you’re showing off at this point. The human characters look great, full of warmth and personality and emotion. The biggest weakness of the Toy Story franchise was how the people tended to resemble plastic toys themselves, and that’s no longer the case.

But I think I’m over Toy Story. Let’s face it, there’s exactly three stories you can get out of this concept—toys lose their owners; toys are no longer wanted; toys confront an existential crisis—and after four movies, Pixar has explored them all. Everything on the screen provoked a reaction of “yep, seen that before.” It’s well-animated and as sharp and funny as ever, but it’s all getting a bit too comfy at this point.

There’s only one truly original idea: the fork. Woody’s new owner Bonnie makes a weird misshapen figure out of a plastic fork, a popsicle stick, and a pipecleaner, writes her name on its feet, and it comes to life. Which pokes at a neat idea: what makes a toy a toy? Woody and Buzz are expensive branded products, but really, all that separates a “toy” from anything else is a child’s belief. Forky is made of random junk, but Bonnie has decided that he will be a toy. However, the resulting character makes no sense: changing from a near-silent lobotomy victim to wisecracking comic relief as the movie progresses. (There’s a sequence where Forky, believing himself to be trash, keeps trying to throw himself away. Randy Newman, tasked with writing music for this, screwed up his brow in concentration, came up with a song called “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away” and then patted himself on the back for a hard day’s work.) Sadly, Forky ends up becoming yet more clutter in a movie that’s already overstuffed with characters, most of whom wrapped up their arcs several movies ago and have no reason to be there.

Buzz is the prime example. It’s honestly funny how the writers have zero idea of what to do with him and basically write him out of the movie. I mean, his arc is resolved. His whole deal in Toy Story (1995) was that he was delusional and actually thought he was a space ranger. He is no longer delusional, no longer thinks he’s a space ranger, so what are we doing here? Buzz Lightyear is a character past his sell-by date, the equivalent of when you tell a funny story to someone, and instead of laughing they ask “…and then what happened?”

There’s also the issue of what’s not in the movie: a compelling villain.

Sid was great in the first movie, and I have a soft spot for Al McWhiggin. By contrast, Gabby Gabby doesn’t do the business. There’s an idea there (soft-spoken madness), but they don’t push it as far as they need to. The dial’s stuck on 2. They end up giving her a cloying, overly sympathetic backstory (to the point where she basically is forced to become a good guy), leading to the most obnoxious and unearned heel-face turn since Cletus “Gator Molester” Shithat betrayed his best friend Billie-Bob Grunklefuck in the Floribama Swamp-Ass Grand Wrasslin’ Championship of 1993 (classic match, I’m sure you remember it) and becoming a good character. If the first Toy Story had been written this way, we’d get a 20 minute flashback showing how Sid is secretly a nice child who gets yelled at by his dad. Can this studio grow some balls and write a proper villain again? The glory days of Hopper and Syndrome seem far behind us.

Toy Story 4 is not a bad movie. It is a deeply pointless one, however, which may be worse—I love many bad movies, but cannot love a waste of time. I’ve long felt that Pixar is a rat in a Skinner box that pressed a button a few times, received massive amounts of food, and now they’re just senselessly hammering that button forever, regardless of whether food is coming out.

Now they’re making a Toy Story 5. Okay. I have some creative story ideas they could use:

• Woody gets washed out into the Pacific Garbage Patch. Alone and isolated, he goes mad under the hot alien sun, worshipping a god sculpted from plastic drinking straws. At night, he dreams of high-density polyethylene pellets melting and sliding down the stark walls of the sky, like the pale sperm of some celestial progenitor. He starts laughing dementedly, realizing that nature is a powerless fraud, and the world is controlled by the forces of manufacture and industry. In the final scene, he dives suicidally into the ocean, deliberately choking an endangered dolphin with his body while praying to return to the necrotic plastic heart that beats at the planet’s core.
• Woody’s voice-box begins to break. When he pulls the string, the words slur and distort. There’s a sneak in my boot! Someone poisoned the warble-hole! The speech swiftly becomes incomprehensible, melting into a garbled wreckage of sounds, but sometimes, almost-audible messages can be heard, as though something with a thousand tongues is trying to communicate through him. One day, his voice box crackles to life on its own. “Don’t look for it in the garden.” What could this mean? When the toys explore the garden, Hamm finds a single tiny black flower growing beneath a canopy of wisteria and bougainvillea . The toys uproot the flower and dig a hole straight down: two feet under, there is a small, unmarked wooden box with a lock on it. They take the box inside, and Slinky Dog, working alone for several days straight, manages to pick the lock. “What did you see in the box?” Woody asks. “Nothing,” Slinky Dog says, glancing nervously at the ground. “The box was empty.” Immediately, he runs out of the house and out onto the road, where a car smashes him to pieces. The horrified survivors take no more chances with the box. They slam it shut (taking care not to look inside), re-lock it, carry it back to the garden, and bury it again. They promise each other that they’ll forget the incident. But one day, Woody pulls his voice-box string, and hears a distorted recording of Slinky Dog…
• A weird change overcomes the toys. They fall into bestial rages. They are consumed by a hunger that only warm, living flesh can satisfy. Jessie is shown eating a dead bird with her teeth. Mr Potato Head’s hollow shell starts filling up with bloody mouse bones. They start communicating through glottal grunts and roars. Only Rex is unaffected. Researching the problem, he realizes that all of the toys are made of plastic, which is made of petrochemicals, which come from petroleum, which comes from ancient decayed biomass that includes dinosaurs. Essentially, the toys are now possessed by the souls of dead dinosaurs, and Rex is immune because he’s already a dinosaur. He doesn’t know what to do, and lifts up his arms in comical horror as the dinosaur-possessed toys assemble around him—blood dripping from their plastic mouths and hands—and kneel, awaiting his command.
• Bonnie grows to adulthood. Puberty runs her down like an 18-wheeler truck. Confused and impressionable, she makes some friends online, and them some other friends. They introduce her to right and wrong. She cuts her hair, and dyes the remnants in variegated colors. She manufactures an edgy online persona, given to ranty, sweary, pop-feminist dialectic. By age 17, her Twitter pfp shows her with one eyebrow quirkily raised, sipping from a mug with “MALE TEARS” on it. But smugness gives way to guilt. She is a white-presenting person living in the wealthiest nation on Earth, and she feels absolutely horrible about. She was born in sin. Her parents were manspreaders, whitesplainers, and possibly even misgenderers. She seeks to escape who she is. She changes pronouns six times. Her mastectomy is booked for July. Maybe if she destroys the guilty girl, piece by piece, she’ll escape the sense that she’s evil and corrupt. She remains fond of her childhood toys, but realizes that she cannot go on owning Woody—he’s modeled after a Wild West sheriff, and 👏 we! 👏 don’t! 👏 do! 👏 that! 👏 anymore! The final straw comes when she watches the Woody’s Roundup puppet show. Not once does Woody acknowledge that he’s living on Chiricahua Apache land! Horrified, she burns Woody on an open fire, hoping to purge her sins. Woody screams as his face melts. He screams and screams.
• A new toy joins the gang: Murdilator the Deathslayer. He’s pretty cool, particularly his brain-vivisector attachment. But beneath the MADE IN CHINA sticker on his foot there’s a compartment, and inside the compartment, Buzz finds a rolled up scrap of paper. It’s a handwritten Mandarin message. 救命啊！我被困在玩具厂里了！“HELP! I AM TRAPPED IN A TOY FACTORY!” Murdilator consents to have his brain-vivisector attachment damaged on purpose, so that Bonnie’s mom will return him to the story, which will then ship him back to China. The toys sneak into the return-parcel, and one week later, they’re being unpacked at a factory at Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. They want to find the imprisoned man and save him, but they’re in for a shock: all the workers at the factory are that man! They have arrived at a dismal Dickensian sweatshop. Thousands of dead-eyed contract workers sit in rows, performing Q&A inspections of worthless plastic dreck for brutal hours and starvation wages. Even death is not an escape. The factory doors are locked, and anti-suicide nets are strung under every window. An overseer walks up and down the benches like a slave-driver at a galley, and snatches up the damaged Murdilator from the packaging. With vindictive swiftness, he identifies the worker who signed off on this particular toy, and docks him a week’s salary. The man starts weeping. He has a family. The toys are left heartsick by what they’ve done: they haven’t helped the man, they’ve made his lot in life even worse! The rest of the movie is Murdilator the Deathslayer sitting on a therapist’s chair with Hamm, trying to overcome his guilt. Eventually, he has a breakthrough. He leaps into the air and cheers, and we end on a blissful reprise of “You Got A Friend in Me”.
• Bo Peep is sold to a new owner. Unfortunately he’s an anime fan. The camera’s focus tightens around her terrified face, like an ensnaring net. From somewhere out of frame, we hear heavy breathing, and the sound of pants unzipping. The camera goes mercifully black.
• A crossover, where Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber explain Christianity to the gang. Who’s mightier, God or the Boogie-Man? Does the Bible really tell us to forgive our enemies?
• Really, they should probably just not make the movie at all. Enough’s enough.