Lotso’s heavy burden

SPOLIERS: this post contains spoilers for Toy Story 3 and slight spoilers for Primer.

I just watched Toy Story 3 the other day with some small family members. I had seen it once before, and both times I have really enjoyed it as a touching sequel & conclusion to the Toy Storys I grew up with (I never bothered with Toy Story 4). I love how each movie fleshes out different implications of the relationship between children and their toys, which makes a fertile thematic ground for exploring the ways relationships change.

There is plenty of this kind of exploration in Toy Story 3, from Andy’s toys’ evolving relationship with their college-bound kid to the lives of daycare toys with an eternal rotation of new kids coming in to play with them. This time, something about the story’s antagonist, Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear (or just Lotso), started rolling around in my mind after I watched it.

So Lotso is one rotten toy. He dominates and abuses other toys without any remorse, and even betrays the protagonists after they risk their own lives to save him. Clearly, he is not the type of villain with a redemption arc or even the potential for one.

But it seems to me like his backstory on its own could offer a lot of potential for redemption. Lotso was his kid Daisy’s favorite toy, but he and two other toys are accidentally left behind at a rest stop. After a long struggle to make it home to Daisy, they discover that Lotso has been replaced by a new Lotso, presumably with Daisy none the wiser about the replacement.

This doppelgänger is living Lotso’s former happy life, which he was so desperate to recover. Daisy’s love for him continues on, unbroken, but with him no longer the object of it. In a sense, his double has become the real him and he has become a sort of ghost, like the time-displaced protagonists of Primer. This is the moment where Lotso “snaps” and begins his transformation into the irredeemable villain of the story.

Watching the scenes where the backstory is discussed, I noticed that both Chuckles and Woody point out that Lotso himself is the only one that has been replaced, not Chuckles or Big Baby. No one offers Lotso any other way to make sense of his frankly horrible situation except to drive home the bleak reality of his ghosthood. This is presented as Lotso’s unique burden to bear (pun intended…?).

But the scenario is something that could happen to almost any toy*, through no fault of their own. It’s not Lotso’s fault that he was inadvertently left behind, or that he was replaced. If anything, his replacement is a testament to how much Daisy loved him, which makes the situation all the more devastating.

I would be interested to see this same situation explored through a more sympathetic toy character. Lotso’s turn to the dark side is not the only possible response to such a wound, but moving on would not be simple or easy. He could have let Chuckles and Big Baby return to Daisy, but what next? How could a toy begin to heal in this scenario? What could Chuckles or Woody have said to a sympathetic version of Lotso to throw him a line back to the land of the living?

Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.

* Notably, this is something that probably could not happen to Woody, as he is an old and rare toy.