Toy Story That Time Forgot (2014)

Toy Story That Time Forgot arrives as a twenty-two minute holiday special, which places it in the curious limbo between a short film and an episode of television, produced by Pixar for ABC and broadcast in December of 2014. The premise is modest. Trixie, a plastic triceratops, resents that Bonnie casts her as a lady rather than a dinosaur, and a post-Christmas play date deposits the gang in a cousin's playroom ruled by the Battlesaurs, a delusional action-figure line that does not yet know it is merchandise. There is a tyrant called The Cleric, an arena, an air vent, and a video game console standing in for everything the special distrusts about modern childhood.

Trixie's grievance is the closest thing to a thesis. She wants to be a dinosaur, not a lady, and the special lets her say so plainly. This is a mild observation about gendered playtime, and it resolves into the gentler proposition that she is happy in any role Bonnie assigns. The complaint dissolves on contact with the warm ending. Angel Kitty, a Christmas ornament who speaks almost entirely in aphorisms, supplies the closing moral and then vanishes, leaving the other toys silent. That silence reads as the special's own awareness that it has just been preachy, briefly and without much conviction.

Elsewhere the special is content to be a playroom adventure. Race is not a subject. The environment is not a subject. Money is not a subject, despite a plot about a toy line, because the villain's authoritarianism belongs to cartoon villainy, not economics. The voice cast is drawn from the established franchise roster, familiar and very white, with no evident effort made to alter the arrangement. The result is a brisk, technically accomplished diversion, acclaimed by critics and forgotten by most everyone else, which is the correct fate for a Christmas special that knows exactly how little it wants to say.