Hide yo' kids: Hollywood Reporter complains that Toy Story 4 is too white and doesn't tackle 'prejudice, money, and unemployment'

Sarah D | 1:54 PM on January 06, 2020

Can you believe it? It’s 2020, and animated kids’ movies are still so very problematic. Case in point, “Toy Story 4.” According to Hollywood Reporter executive features editor Stephen Galloway, it’s just too damn white and unwoke:

It's not just near-absence of people of color in #ToyStory4 that’s bothersome, it’s the absence of anything approximating life in America as most know it https://t.co/d4d3TZCCYC

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) January 5, 2020

So we’re really doing this? Galloway writes:

The picture — which seems a lock for best animated feature at this Sunday’s Golden Globes, and probably the Oscars, too — left me in awe. So why did a slightly bitter taste linger, a sense that something was naggingly wrong?

Because in many ways TS4′s worldview seems like an Eisenhower-era fantasy, a vision of America that might have come from the most die-hard reactionary: lovely if you’re wealthy and white, but alarming if you’re black or brown or gay or a member of any other minority — in other words, more than half the U.S. population.

…

TS4’s main family lives in a big, brightly lit house in an ivory utopia; its daughter sleeps in a plush room packed with a U.S. Treasury’s worth of gizmos; they drive around in a gas-guzzling RV, stopping for carnivals and carnies that would be right at home in the 1940s or 1950s. Problems of prejudice, money and unemployment never seem to cross anyone’s mind.

Did it cross Galloway’s mind that this is a kids’ movie and that kids should be allowed to spend some time not thinking about things like prejudice, money, and unemployment?