THE NEXT CHAPTER
ANDY’S TOYS ARE NOW OWNED BY BONNIE, AND A WHOLE NEW ADVENTURE AWAITS THEM IN
NEW FRIENDS
Keanu Reeves can’t stop saying “KABOOM!” It’s understandable – he’s just excited to explain how Duke Caboom, the Evel Knievel-inspired action figure he voices in Toy Story 4, is unlike the franchise’s other catchphrase-happy daredevil. “I wanted to make sure I didn’t go into Tim Allen’s space as Buzz Lightyear, so I made Duke a little more gravelly but still tried to give him energy and a big personality,” says Reeves between kabooms. “Duke should love what he does. He’s the greatest stuntman in Canada! But I definitely wanted him to be in this chorus and not the lead.”
Few choruses are better company than
Toy Story’s plastic posse of playthings, who return Thu., Jun. 21 in the franchise’s fourth – and potentially final – film. Toy
Story 4 sends Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz
(Allen) and the gang on a road trip to a sleepy bucolic town that’s home to a colourful carnival, an eerie antique shop, and faces both familiar and brand new.
Well, new-ish. Reeves’ Duke Caboom is fresh out of the ’70s. There’s also the smallest Toy Story toy to date, a feisty
’80s Polly Pocket spoof named Officer
Giggle McDimples (Ally Maki), as well as Christina Hendricks’ villain, Gabby
Gabby, a creepy doll from the ’50s who commands an army of ventriloquist dummies. (Think
Annabelle by way of The Godfather.)
“I really wanted to see toys from different eras, and we were also excited to see just how big this world could be – if we’re going to make a fourth film, it needs to be bigger,” says first-time feature director Josh
Cooley. “We couldn’t have picked a better person to voice our villain than Christina. She can play such sweet innocence, and then at the flip of a switch go cold and terrifying. And once Keanu came to the table, he asked all these great questions and started doing different voices and actually jumped up on the table in the middle of Pixar to act out his great ideas.”
Beyond their bold personalities, the new characters put a face to the film’s core theme of coping with transition. Cooley explains: “The whole of Toy Story is based on the idea that everything has a purpose in life, and for Woody, now that he’s been given to a new kid, what’s his purpose? Toy Story 3 is the end of Woody’s arc with Andy, but it’s not the end of Woody’s story.”
It’s safe to assume he’ll go out with a kaboom.
TOGETHER AGAIN
During their trip upstate, Woody and Buzz miraculously find a familiar face from home: Bo Peep, who reemerges to her old pals as a toy lost – and a woman changed.
“Bo’s been lost a long time, and she’s had a lot of time to work it out, but she’s come to a happy place on the road,” says Annie Potts, who voiced the character in the 1995 original and 1999’s Toy Story 2. The actress says she “felt a little bit like Bo” when the character wasn’t to be found in 2010’s Toy Story 3 but returns now with a new outfit and a new outlook. “Bo was a little hampered by the fact that she was porcelain and stuck to a lamp, so they freed her up from that and she’s reinvented herself. All she has is what she had on her back, and she’s made that her cape. She’s kind of Mad Max … Mad Maxine.”
Director Josh Cooley found inspiration in another iconic film. “Because they’ve known each other such a long time, the relationship that Indiana Jones had with Marion is something I had in mind with Woody and Bo,” says Cooley, who’s eager to showcase the pair’s clashing approaches to adventuring – like in the scene (pictured above) where Woody, Bo, Buzz and rescued carnival prizes Ducky and Bunny (Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele) infiltrate an old antique shop that’s home to an evil doll who has taken a few precious prisoners. “Woody flies by the seat of his pants sometimes – actually, most of the time – and immediately jumps off emotion into action,” says the director. “Bo has that same energy, but at the same time she’s always four steps ahead of everybody else.”That may only be a few centimetres, but still.