#99 ‘Toy Story’

Plastic, Possession, and the Cult of Male Sentience in a Kid’s Bedroom

Toy Story (1995) is the darling of digital animation history—the first fully computer-animated feature film and Pixar’s declaration of war on traditional storytelling as we knew it. It’s clever, fast-paced, and emotionally manipulative in that soft-voiced, Randy Newman-scored way that Pixar has since turned into a billion-dollar empathy factory. But peel back the nostalgic glee and beneath the plastic lies a surprisingly rigid structure about hierarchy, masculine insecurity, and the terrifying idea that your self-worth depends entirely on how much one child likes you.

At the heart of the story is Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), a cowboy doll with the personality of a middle manager facing redundancy. He’s charming, sure, but only in the brittle, controlling way of someone who knows his power is hanging by a thread—and that thread is a six-year-old boy named Andy. Woody’s entire sense of identity is tied to being “the favorite,” which makes Toy Story less a whimsical romp and more a parable about white-collar male fragility in the face of younger, flashier competition.

Enter Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen), a shiny, self-important space toy who doesn’t realize he’s a toy—which, in this universe, is treated as both tragic and hilarious. His existential delusion is milked for comedy until it becomes pathos, at which point the film pivots hard and asks you to cry over a mass-produced action figure discovering his own disposability. It’s capitalism with tear ducts.

The real arc is Woody learning to share dominance, not dismantle it. At no point is the toy hierarchy seriously questioned. It’s just adjusted to accommodate two alphas instead of one. The other toys—Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, Hamm—exist as a Greek chorus of anxious consumers terrified of obsolescence. The film has the emotional stakes of Glengarry Glen Ross, but with more googly eyes.

And the women? Minimal. Bo Peep is the designated female love interest with a porcelain waist and the personality of a polite lampshade. Her purpose is to soothe Woody’s ego and bat her eyelashes. There are no female friendships, no real agency, no equivalent power struggle among the women—just boys jousting for status while everyone else literally stays in the toy box.

That said, Toy Story is tight. The script is smart. The voice acting is spot-on. The animation, groundbreaking for its time, holds up surprisingly well. It’s paced like a caper, scored like a lullaby, and structured like a therapy session for toys processing abandonment and identity crises.

4 out of 5 plastic hats
(One for the script’s wit. One for the innovation. One for the voice acting. One for the emotional gut-punch that sneaks up on you. The missing star? Stuck behind the glassy eyes of the female toys, who were never given inner lives—only soft voices and the patience to wait while the cowboys and spacemen figured out who gets to sit in the front seat of someone else’s childhood.)