Today I came across this funny little rumor that Pixar might be considering remaking The Brave Little Toaster.

Like many of the commenters, I don’t believe a word of it. While Pixar is the only studio I can think of that I would trust to modernize a cartoon as stealthily profound as TBLT, and I would certainly go running to the theaters with great excitement were it to ever happen, I feel pretty safe categorizing such a notion as pure fantasy. For one thing, Pixar is far too fond of creating fresh ideas to bother remaking a cult classic, which is of course one of the things we all love about them. More importantly, however, the actual story content and mood of TBLT runs counter to Pixar’s modus operandi. I consider this to be neither a good nor a bad thing, as it should be obvious by now that I adore both these subjects, but I certainly think that they don’t belong together.

Pixar, like any maker of brilliant children’s media, is not afraid to touch on the dark and unsettling aspects of their stories. At the same time, each of their films is buoyed by a strong undercurrent of hope. Even their flagship Toy Story, which shares some thematic similarities with The Brave Little Toaster and clearly has said movie as one of its influences, is an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity. TBLT, on the other hand, is a surrealist tragedy that has a happy ending only in the barest sense of the term–it is a veneer, a requirement because it is a kid’s movie, but really only a thin disguise that does nothing to change the fact that the main themes of the film are sacrifice, abandonment and despair.

Most people I know have one of two opinions about The Brave Little Toaster. Either it scared them when they were children, so they hate it, or it scared them when they were children, so they adore it. The former often cite this particular piece of nightmare fuel, and it’s no surprise that such a sequence is certainly terrifying for young kids and would put a lot of them off liking the film.¹ There are many more examples of frightening symbolism: mangled appliances sing about the ongoing horror that is their lives; the vacuum cleaner gets upset at one point and starts choking on his own cord; and I hope I’m not the only person who thought that the Blanket’s needy obsession with its Master was kind of creepy.²

But some of us, for whatever reason, were not driven away by TBLT’s dark undertones, instead finding ourselves drawn in by its at times heartbreaking poignancy. For instance, the highest point of hopefulness in the film is followed almost immediately by this:

The infamous Air Conditioner scene, extremely stylized and even a little silly, is nonetheless a perfect blend of the film’s frightening aspects and tragic themes:

For my money, though, the best sequence in The Brave Little Toaster is the song “Worthless.” This occurs right before the climax of the movie and is the part that sums up its message. Various junked cars sing about their invariably sad lives as they are, one by one, crushed into tiny cubes by an emotionless machine:

This is, in my opinion, one of the most affecting scenes in children’s cinema, and can be attested to by the numerous YouTube commenters discussing which car they personally think has the saddest story.³ This scene is promptly followed by a very disturbing climax, in which the Toaster has to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to save his Master, mangling his metal body in the cruel gears of fate for the sake of someone whom he has always deemed to have far greater value than himself. Then the Master repairs him and adopts him once more into his shelter of usefulness and love, but I ignore that part because, as I said waaaaaay back at the beginning of this post, it fails to convince me (dramatically speaking). The rest of the movie is just too goddamned sad.

So here ends my rave about why TBLT is awesome, and secondarily why Pixar will never remake it because they are awesome in an entirely different and less depressing way. If anyone has actually made it this far, I’m glad I got to share my obsession with the underlying dark themes of children’s movies with you. I’m only one of the many people that this film has made a permanent impression on, and I think it deserves to be lauded for what it is. However, as it grows dated, I doubt it will be resurrected anytime soon even by the magnificent Pixar. It’s actually quite fitting that this little movie about the doom of obsolescence should suffer that fate itself, but at the very least it will live on in the hearts of many children born in the 1980s, and perhaps even those of future generations will find something to appreciate in it. Some things never lose their worth.

1. My younger sister has told me that she saw the movie when she was young and then saw it again as an older child with the “clown” scene removed for the television version, and for a long time didn’t know whether the scene had actually existed or whether she had simply made it up–which would make it all the scarier. [↩]
2. The part that especially sticks in my memory runs from 1:43 to 2:11 in that video. [↩]
3. For me it goes either to the pink convertible who has given up on life but is unsure how or why, or to the pickup from a reservation that served loyally only to be rewarded with a thankless abandonment–I also find it interesting that he is the only car to drive himself to the crusher rather than being dragged there by the magnet. [↩]