The jazzy tune that accompanies said sequence plays both smoothly and deeply, the decrepit vehicles reminiscing days past with lyrics that shame nearly any production by the post-1960 Mouse House for pure existential weight (says a hearse, of all things: “I beg your pardon, it's quite hard enough / Just living with the stuff I have learned”). Toaster’s titular qualities are relished most meaningfully in a decisive act of self-sacrifice, in a set piece pitting the appliances against what can be called the film's Great Satan, a literal hellmouth (a garbage dump trash compactor) that mercilessly destroys used cars and any other items deemed worthless by their former owners. In many such ways does the film embitter its audience to the unfairness of the world, primarily for those who go about it with the best of intentions. Unaccustomed to the mirror image before it, the flower relishes companionship before the toaster flees in fear, the lowly plant wilting soon thereafter in response to its now-assured solitude. When the five animated appliances decide to up and leave their abandoned cottage to search for their “master”-a young boy now grown and long departed from the summer home where our electrical protagonists now reside-one of their first discoveries is that of the surrounding wildlife, and in a life-impacting sequence, the toaster discovers a lone flower in the darkness of the wood. A lesser film might have smothered the beautiful stretches of scenery with some needless third-person voiceover, but Jerry Rees’ is one intimately reliant on often provocative, even disturbing imagery. Disch’s 1980 novel of the same name, the film presents its story of five common appliances-a toaster, an electric blanket, a vacuum cleaner, a lamp, and a radio-much like the intended bedtime narrative of its literary predecessor, at once fable-esque and genuinely hip. Among the finest animated films Disney never made (but would like you to think they did), The Brave Little Toaster employs aesthetic simplicity to deliver an emotional wallop in its evocation of transformative childhood experiences-the dark, often unwanted discoveries that pave the way to a more enlightened adulthood.
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