Same Pixar Fun, Now With Heavy-Handed Disney Life Lessons

Rating: 7/10 (5 October 2019)

So, now we see how the Disney of its early days became the boring, heavy-handed Disney of my childhood. No matter how many people lauded Disney's movies for being wonderful children's movies when I was a kid, all I saw was boring. And, I actually loved the earliest (1940's and earlier) Disney cartoons.
In Toy Story 4, you see glints of the fun, interesting Pixar of old, but you're constantly bombarded with boring storyline that doesn't seem to go anywhere. Only in the end do you see the overall plot and Disney's life lesson that took an entire movie storyline to communicate: in this case, it's that everyone learns to let go.
In Toy Story 3, we saw the sad end of the path everyone travels from childhood into adulthood. I cried and my heart ached at the inevitable separation we experience as we all become adults, as seen through the eyes of the child's toys we had all grown to love since Toy Story 1. Inevitably, we all leave our childhood playthings behind.
Toy Story 4, if you watch it through to the end, extends that story to the toys like Woody and Bo Peep, showing them also grow in that way, leaving behind what they always clung to, what they always used to justify their existence. And, interestingly, Bo's character has grown into a strong, modern female character because of that, implying nobody, especially women, needs to cling to another person (man or woman) to justify their existence and give them purpose. It's a great message.
But, what you end up with is, overall, BORING. Never, ever, in the past have I ever started to fall asleep during a pure Pixar movie. I did during Toy Story 4, several times. My daughter just wasn't captivated by this movie, not enough to watch it more than once, and I doubt she seriously put together all the pieces to get that message as I stated above. There were a half dozen good parts of the movie, but it was mostly just DULL -- like the Disney movies I grew up with that I generally didn't care to watch.
So, if you deliver a good message that requires you to watch the entire movie, not missing parts of it, putting all the pieces together in the end, have you accomplished anything worthwhile when nobody will stick around to the end? The Pixar of old entertained kids and adults together, in different, refreshing ways, and delivered good messages at the same time.
Toy Story 4 just shows that the Pixar revolution has, in fact, been fully absorbed into Disney's fun-destroying movie distortion field. I would not be a bit surprised if the next Pixar project is a Care Bears reboot movie...