5. The Brave Little Toaster (1987)

I am not the kids' cartoon movie watching type (although I did recently revisit the Nightmare Before Christmas and was mildly excited for around a half-hour, when I realized it was Tuesday and I had forgotten to record the previous day's new episode of House. I panicked, calmed down, and went to sleep) but I did recently re-watch all of The Brave Little Toaster, and I must say, what seems only to be an innocent children's movie is... a lot to swallow. I feel as if I learned about homosexuality, alcoholism and the Holocaust, all from this movie -- maybe this explains both my low grades in Health class and my inability to become a serious Jew.

But I guess even as a little kid I knew how serious it was. I remember being horrified of a specific scene where an angry air-conditioner gets louder and louder, enraged by something (maybe the whole being immobile and stuck is a wall for eternity thing gets to ya.) But I also remember watching the movie repeatedly anyway, and almost being too scared to skip the scene -- as if it would know I'd avoided it and come back at me with twice the rage. I had to get through it each time. The Brave Little Toaster may have been the first movie I, in some way, enjoyed being scared of. Maybe even the first thing. And I don't mean "enjoyed" in the way that I enjoy a roller-coaster these days, where I am all-at-once frightened and elated, and then satisfied afterward, but in the way that I was just so thankful when the horrifying air-conditioner scene was over. The scene was meant to be scary, the air conditioner was meant to be scary... and I was scared. Doesn't happen quite like that anymore.. (although I did watch Eraserhead, a '79 Lynch film, and it was horrifying. Several other people I talked to agreed we were, as good of a film as it was, simply glad when it was over... it is an accurate depiction of a nightmare.)

The Brave Little Toaster is a cartoon in which each character is a different household item, each, in countless ways, representing a certain type of person, a human characteristic, a disorder, a condition, a personality type, an astrological sign. One's paranoid, another old, another has Attention Deficit Disorder (and yet another is taking the ADD one's pills...), each with his or her own fears, dreams, IQ's and apparent genders -- some of which are unclear. The Brave Little Toaster itself has never really called out a specific sex to me., yet the vacuum is clearly male, and older.

The names of the characters are simply the names of the objects themselves, and they refer to each-other this way. Ingenious, I say. Lamp, Blanket, Toaster, etc. This is not a superficial movie, made by Pixar, about aliens and robots and monsters shaped like boogers who travel through doorways to dreams, which float light-blue in the oceanic heads of boys, all to save the planet from mutant alien/human crossbreeds from the past. This is a movie about a lamp and a toaster.

The film follows Toaster, Blanket, Vacuum and Radio (it's about a group of 5) on their quest to get back to their master, a kid who is in the process of moving to a college dorm as a freshman, whose mother throws out his desk lamp, toaster, etc. thinking he will need new ones for the beginning of his new life at school. What better to make you feel at home in the early days of college than a new desk lamp and vacuum? The gang will not have anything of mom's attempt to trash them and they begin their treacherous journey (at times literally through the woods) to find their master. The amount of metaphor, symbolism and depth that can be extrapolated from this idea alone is enough to write an entire "blog" about... (I dare someone to get on that -- you could call it "the brave little blogger"... although that sounds a bit like the harrowing story of a turd that had a tough few minutes getting all the way to the bottom of the bowl...)

In true cartoon fashion, the master does not know his objects can speak or think... (e.g. Toy Story :: the idea of God not knowing that we even have the capacity to know of his existence, or maybe the realization that we can never truly know God fully because we are not worthy, only humans, striving to reach a power we could never handle if we possessed. Anyone who thinks they have reached God obviously has brought the old guy down a few pegs, or is on meth). These objects are on a quest to once again have a purpose -- to be used by their Master, remaining quiet and still and submissive when doing so, for a theoretical eternity. The lamp wants only to be switched on, and then off, to shine brightly on the master's books as he studies, and to remain steady in the face of gravity and draftiness. The movie could be looked at as the quest to have a sound mind, to be zen, or knowing you are serving a higher purpose -- one that makes you obsolete and silent and yet so useful and vital to the big picture (at least in the master's universe.) And there are no reasons for that definite higher power :: the master (the, ehem... college kid...) being supreme. He simply is. It is known, truth, fact and reality to each character, on an arguably sub-intellectual level. Their souls call out to him and long for his approval. It's about the journey to have a true purpose in which the means is the end. An absolute goal. Enlightenment. Heaven. Take your pick. Pick your take.

And I don't necessarily mean to say that the Master is symbolically "God." In fact, I'd make a case for him not being God at all. The master is a human being. The objects who so crave his company (a bit too much like a drug at times...) are his things. He is the "Master" of his domain. He is his own God, ruling his own world, consisting of a lamp, vacuum and radio... ah, college...

::

Or, it's a cartoon about a lamp and a toaster on a magical adventure.

Either way, it's funny and exciting and almost undeniably deep. Many sequences are surely about death, bravery, money and porn addiction.

Okay, maybe not death...

And if you say you've already seen it, most likely when you were small, watch it again, hopefully this time feeling sightly less horrified by the air-conditioner (or maybe more, depending on drug-intake, mood, sleep patterns and time spent watching Intervention on TV.)

Note :: the whole movie could also be seen as an "allegory of the cave" type deal. Simplified to an extreme, we are the objects, God is the master, and we have no idea that there is a whole world beyond us. We do not have the ability to perceive it... (it's a stretch, but I think worth bringing up. You're fucking stoned anyway.)

Another note :: I think I remembered the existence of this movie around 6 months ago in a subconscious daydream which left me very unsettled. There are some movies we must have watched so many times over and over as small kids that they must be a huge part of who we are, how we see every movie, or how we see... everything. Anything scary to me is that goddamn air conditioner. I also listened to too much Queen as a young chubby boy.

I could go on forever about this one. You get the point.

In the end, God loves bravery, even if you are a motherfucking toaster

Alec GEE of YardLEE

This movie is horrifying ::