Brave Little Toaster Essay

Worthless
A Look at the Bleak World of Household Appliances

When I was a little kid, there was a movie I saw on the Disney Channel that I absolutely loved.  After I saw it, I couldn't stop talking about it and bothered my parents to no end until they recorded it for me on a blank VHS tape.  I even took a character from the movie as an imaginary friend, naming our house vacuum cleaner "Kirby."  It was an Electrolux, actually, but that's really not the point.

I'm confident that most of my readers will get that clue right there, but for the benefit of the current generation, who were not even yet gleams in our eyes when this movie came out, I'm talking about "The Brave Little Toaster," a film put together by the same people who would later go on to found Pixar Animation.  I guess Lasseter just always had a thing for anthropomorphizing inanimate objects for movies.

I know that you'll be expecting me to give some kind of breakdown of the film's quality according to my personal views of what makes for a good or bad movie, but for this little review, I think I'm going to do something just a little bit different.  If I didn't, then what would make me any different from the Nostalgia Critic?  I mean aside from lacking the delusional belief that Will Ferrell is funny, obviously.

I'm going to focus very heavily on the last half of the film in order to discuss just how bleak its undertones are.  These days, studio executives seem to cut any potentially dark elements from kid's films and this is probably the real reason why kid movies are now no more than smoke and noise to keep the kiddies quiet while the parents do anything other than raising their offspring properly.  By the end of this, I hope to have demonstrated what they've really lost because of this.  I'd like to say that hopefully this will persuade film-makers to return to form, but, much like the movie I'm about to discuss, my outlook on life is bleak enough not to believe that will happen.

But what am I talking about, I hear so many of you asking?  Brave Little Toaster was such a cute movie about talking appliances that go in search of their owner.  In the end, they find him and go off to collage with him and everything's all bright, happy and wonderful.  Yay reaffirmation of traditional moral views of family!

Yes, the movie starts off very cute and it certainly ends on a happy note.  Everything they run into in the countryside on their journey to the city is fairly nice and pretty, or at least there's no open malevolence to any of it (well, except for the clown, but that was just a dream, so it doesn't count).  It even has a scene where the animals have a little party and the appliances dance along with them.  It's all very nice and cute and "kid friendly."  Since I've got a degree in literature criticism, I therefore have nothing to say on the matter and must politely request that you not think about it while I now go off on everything that happens after they encounter the first human being.

The first man they meet is a pudgy greasemonkey named Elmo St. Peters, who runs a parts shop on the outskirts of the city they've been trying to get to.  It's at this point that those who haven't seen the film in years might be getting a bit of a kick to their memory, because this sequence is downright unsettling, openly facing how truly horrible such a shop would be in a world where the appliances are actually alive.  It's distinctive tonal shift that serves as an affective marker for the transition from the country to the city that takes on the kind of quality of b-movie horror films of the 20s and 30s.  It even features an eerie song celebrating the genre of second-string horror, even to the point of name-dropping Vincent Price.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.  Let's back up a bit.  When the appliances first arrive, they're greeted in what seems like a warm manner.  The hanging lamp even offers Lampy a bulb to replace the one that broke during a storm earlier in the film.  The appliances in Mr. St. Peters's shop don't seem vindictive and that's an important point to remember when they're singing a song that seems to have no point beyond upsetting small children.  This warmth doesn't last long, however; no sooner does Lampy get his bulb replaced than Mr. St. Peters gets a customer and we are subjected to watching the tubby man gleefully unscrew a blender's bottom and cut out the motor before packaging it for sale.  The last thing we see as he leaves is the blender's oil dripping off the workbench onto the floor in a way that is easily designed to make us think of blood.

This is when the song "It's a B-Movie" starts.  While the song itself seems to be delighting in the nostalgia of the old horror movie double-features of days past, it's important to remember that this song is not actually about horror itself.  The song begins in response to Lampy's question "How do we escape?"  In that context, the purpose of the song is not meant to scare the appliances, but to present to them the bitter truth that there is no hope of escape from the situation they are in the most brutal way possible.  It's meant to disabuse them of the notion that they will ever get out alive, because all of them have long since given up on escape and now consider hope to be a source of anguish rather than motivation.

Perhaps the best moment in the song is when the protagonists sing their only lines in it.  Looking out the window an watching the sun go down, they offer up a plea to the greater forces of a universe that seems to care about them in the most Lovecraftian way possible.  "Somebody tell me that fate has been kind!" they plead.  To which the other appliances reply, "You can't get out, you are out of your mind!" as they drag them away from the dying light into the shadows, the imagery of their cords and plugs evoking the tentacles of Great Cthulhu's star spawn in very surreal way.

In short, the message is clearly, "You're already dead, you just don't know it yet."

They do manage to escape this nightmare, but you're fooling yourself if it gets any more pleasant after this, because the next song that we leap into is when the heroes arrive at the Master's house and meet his mother's appliances.  While this scene is less overtly frightening, it's no less dark in its implications.  The sequence is the closest to incoherent that the movie gets (which is impressive when you consider our hero is a toaster oven), bombarding us with a string of images that have no connection to each other except for the connecting theme of advancing technology.  It becomes reminiscent of shopping channels, flashing images of "Buy now!" and "As seen on TV!" while gleefully celebrating self-indulgence in its only repeating lyric: "More.  More!  MORE!  Everything you wanted and MORE!"

The new appliances in the Master's home represent more than just the march of technology, but also the steady disintegration of the film's family values due, in some ways, to the advancements that have come with technology.  Before the explosion of steady advancements that began in the 80s and continues still to this day, everything you bought could be cherished and reused, handed down from one generation to the next because they still remained useful.  Nowadays, the continual stream of developments means that within a matter of years, old technology is already obsolete and replaced with better things.  In the mere twenty years since this movie came out, all of the "cutting edge" appliances have already become laughably antiquated.

The darkest irony is that the very appliances that are celebrating their place as the best modern technology can provide seem blissfully unaware of just how transient that status actually is.  They look down on the older appliances disdainfully, hating them for being the ones that the Master wants to take to his college dorm.  They are trying to make the main characters feel useless by pointing out how outdated they are, never once realizing that new appliances that are going to be on the market just a few years later will be saying the very same thing to them.  The march of technology will leave everybody behind sooner or later and for all the pride you can take in yourself now, in a horribly short time, people will be laughing at that pride because they've already surpassed you.

This is very much like the way ideas are treated.  Society is always coming up with new ideas and new social philosophies and with each new thought, followers of the movements look down on the old way of thinking and claim themselves to be more enlightened then those that came before.  They smugly accuse the old generation of being "conservative fanatics" for clinging to the beliefs and ideals they grew up with, never once realizing that their own children will go on to develop new ideals and doom them to become the same "conservatives" that they railed against; the same song, but with different lyrics.  In effect, time makes them a parody of their own philosophies.

Now, before you go and try to tell me that I'm reaching a bit, comparing appliances to people, the very next sequences makes the same logical step, which is what makes the junkyard sequence the bleakest in the entire film and makes Brave Little Toaster the darkest children's movie not based on a Richard Adams book.

The junkyard shows us how all outdated appliances ultimately end up; smashed into tiny cubes to be sold as scrap metal.  As it starts out, it first seems to merely continue the theme of appliances being thrown away after their usefulness is replaced by newer machines.  As a grim counterpoint to the celebration of being on the cutting edge we had just been subjected to mere minutes before, one of the cars, an Indy 500 racer, explicitly tells us where all those appliances are going to end up.

"I was the top of line,
Out of sight, out of mind,
So much for fortune and fame."

The race car had also been on the cutting edge in its own time.  It was so central to that car's self-image that it is the last thing it thinks about as it is carried helplessly to its destruction.  That would be dark enough, but this is the last car in the song to sing about technology, while all that follow meditate more on their owners than themselves.

The next car that gets smashed is a yellow car decorated with bull horns, which sings about how it once drove its owner to a wedding.  That sounds nice, until you realize that the lyrics talk about how after the wedding, the man couldn't stop thinking about how lonely his life was.  The next car makes it worse.  The magnet crane picks up a hearse which talks about taking a man to a graveyard and how hard it is for the hearse to think about what it's seen.  As an extra dash of spice, the two cars are smashed at the same time, one on top of the other.  As these two are the only cars that get crushed together, this may be interpreted that the man the hearse took to the graveyard was the same man that left the wedding feeling alone and unloved, possibly implying suicide.

But it keeps getting worse after that until you come to the final car, whose lyrics are so bleak that you'll need some antidepressants just to go on after you hear them.  The song, which seemed like it had been crescendoing up to that point, suddenly slows down sharply and adopts a blues sort of tone.  We see a green pickup truck sitting on top of a bus right next to the conveyor belt that will take it to the smasher.  It sings:

"I worked on a reservation.
Who would believe they would love me and leave
On a bus back to old Santa Fe?
Once in the Indian nation,
I took the kids on the skids
With a Hopi who was happy
To lie there and say,
'You're worthless.'"

From this, we can guess that the truck's job was to shuttle Indian children back and forth before his job was eventually given to a bus.  His job itself didn't seem to bother him so much as the things he saw doing it.  The adult mentioned as chaperoning the kids had no ambition or care for them and even went so far as to make a point of telling the kids that they were worthless.  This closes the song by changing the subject dramatically.  Instead of merely singing about how people saw the cars as worthless, it becomes about how people see even their own kind as worthless.

At this point, it should be noted that the truck is the only car in the junkyard that seems to work.  It doesn't look particularly damaged, although years of neglect seem to have dulled the paint job and may rusted it a little bit, but it can still drive.  We know it can because when the crane comes to pick it up, it suddenly kicks into gear and drives away, but not to escape.  Although the cut avoids explicitly showing it, the position of the truck that we were shown in the establishing shot clearly tells us that the truck drove onto the conveyor belt instead of away from it.  Here was a truck that, with a little bit of repairs and repainting, could be good as new and still useful, probably for years to come, but the things it saw while working on the reservation so robbed it of hope that it would rather willingly go into the trash compactor and be crushed than go on serving the people who made it.

"Brave Little Toaster" portrays world where its not just appliances that are used, abused and then thrown away.  Although we never see it happening, the movie clearly implies that people are just as badly mistreated as the electronics that they create.  It seems to represent a world where very few people care about each other, much less their possessions.  It provides us with a little light at the end of the tunnel, what with the Master ultimately saving the appliances and taking them with him, but he is the only character in the film presented as caring in any significant way about the main characters.  

The message of the film is clear: "Cherish the few people you find who actually care about you.  They are the only ones who will."

While the film focuses on the fact that the appliances are cared for by someone, it takes every opportunity to present that one person as the only one.  Yes, there are people in the world who care, but they are few and far between and when you do find them, you have to hold onto them with everything you've got.

Oddly enough, the bleakness of the rest of the world is what allows the film to make the happy ending have impact.  It wouldn't have meant anything if they could have been picked up by just anybody and had a happy life.  They needed that one special Master to take care of them and having the whole miserable world try to stand between them and that happiness made their achievement of it hold emotional weight.  It's not the happy ending that makes the film so heartwarming, it's the bleakness and misery the main characters had to overcome to get it.  It's what makes it transcend the status of sentimental kiddie movie and makes it a story that is worth preserving for future generations to enjoy.

Like the Master the appliances so desperately seek out, Brave Little Toaster is a gem of a movie that needs to be cherished as a film that, for all its flaws, surpasses its peers by leaps and bounds.