Lots-of-Bear

**Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear** (or **Lotso** for short) is the main antagonist of *Toy Story 3*. He is a large, pink strawberry-scented teddy bear who is Woody's arch-nemesis. He lorded over Sunnyside Daycare as if it were a prison, though at first, he behaves like a kindly caretaker who welcomes toys to the daycare center like new members being welcomed to a retirement community. He is one of the main villains of the *Thomas and Twilight Sparkle's Adventures of Toy Story* saga (The other ones being Sid Phillips and Stinky Pete).

He was voiced by **Ned Beatty**who also voiced another animated villain, Tortoise John.

## Background

Lotso started his life as a Christmas present for a little girl named Daisy and instantly became her favorite toy. Lotso seemed to have enjoyed every moment of the time spent at Daisy's house. However, there was an occasion where Daisy took Lotso and her two other toys, a baby doll named Big Baby and a clown named Chuckles, out for a drive with her parents and stopped at a rest stop for a little bit of playtime. After lunch, Daisy fell asleep and her parents took her back into the car, accidentally leaving the toys behind. The three waited for a long time, but Daisy never returned for them. Refusing to give up, Lotso, followed by Chuckles and Big Baby, headed off into the wilderness and finally returned to Daisy's house, only to discover that Daisy had acquired *another* Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear toy, leaving Lotso heartbroken and feeling betrayed.

Those feelings embittered Lotso and it made him turn evil, and develop a more negative point of view about being a toy, and he forcibly ordered Chuckles and Big Baby to leave Daisy and follow him. Chuckles tried to explain that Daisy only replaced him because she missed him so much, but Lotso was too angry and disappointed to listen or be reasoned with. The three lost, cast-off, unloved, and unwanted toys hitched a ride on a Pizza Planet delivery truck's rear bumper until the truck hit a bump in the road, causing them to fall off the bumper. Then they arrived at Sunnyside Daycare, where Lotso took over the daycare and turned it into a prison for toys, with Big Baby as his enforcer. Chuckles had no part of Lotso's rule, and one day he was broken. He was found by Bonnie Anderson, who found him and took him home.

### *Toy Story 3*

When Andy is all grown up, Woody, Buzz, and their best friends end up at Sunnyside after Andy's mother mistook them for trash. There, they first meet Lotso who, at first, treated them pleasantly, and humbly gives them a tour of Sunnyside. Woody doesn't believe that he should stay at daycare and leaves Sunnyside to go look for Andy, but Woody is found by a girl named Bonnie Anderson and he is taken home to Bonnie's house.

Afterwards, Lotso reveals his true evil personality when Buzz requests that he and his toys to not be in the Caterpillar Room anymore. Lotso refuses, saying that the younger children, who don't play nice with the toys as much as Andy did, really need toys. Lotso orders his henchmen toys to switch Buzz Lightyear's play mode to demo mode after Lotso finds the Buzz Lightyear instruction manual, which makes Buzz think that his friends are henchmen of Emperor Zurg, turning Buzz into a hypnotized henchman of Lotso.

During that time, Woody meets with Bonnie's toys. When Woody told them that he escaped from Lotso's prison, Sunnyside Daycare Center, all of Bonnie's toys are shocked that Woody actually escaped out of Sunnyside. Chuckles the clown explains to Woody about Lotso's past.

Meanwhile, the hypnotized Buzz Lightyear locks up Woody's friends so they could suffer like all the other toys. Woody returns to Sunnyside to rescue his friends by going into Bonnie's backpack, but then a Chatter Telephone toy tells Woody that he shouldn't have come back because escape is virtually impossible. The Chatter Telephone reveals all of Lotso's security systems, revealing that a cymbal-banging monkey toy watches all the security cameras and that the outside is always guarded by truck toys. Woody reunites with his friends, who try to reset Buzz and then escape while Lotso was asleep in a chair.

After reaching the dumpster, Lotso and his minions stop the escapees after torturing Chatter Telephone until he talked. However, Woody talks to him about Daisy, revealing that he lied to Big Baby, trying to explain that she had loved him, exposing Big Baby's pendant that Lotso ripped off. All of Lotso's henchmen and other toys realize this, but Lotso didn't care and turned on his henchmen. When Big Baby sniffles about Daisy while looking at the heart-shaped pendant, Lotso snatches it from him and destroys it with his cane. He pokes Big Baby very hard in the chest with his cane and yells at everyone, telling them that toys are just trash waiting to be thrown away, causing even his henchmen to cringe. Big Baby out of anger grabs Lotso and throws him into the dumpster. When Woody's friends try to escape, Lotso pulls Woody into the dumpster.

Soon, Woody, his friends, and Lotso are taken by a garbage truck and are trapped inside a landfill's trash disposal system. Lotso begs for them to help him, sending Woody and Buzz to save him from a giant shredder. After they rescued him, Lotso seemingly reformed. Lotso noticed the emergency stop button that would stop the conveyor belt and save the toys from the incinerator. Woody and his friends relied on him to climb and push the button. However, Lotso didn't change; he had in fact faked gratitude after Woody and Buzz had saved him, and shouted out to Woody, "Where's your kid now, Sheriff?!", running off and leaving the toys to die rather than press the button. Just when all seemed lost for Woody and his friends, they were rescued from the incinerator by a giant claw handled by the three little green alien toys.

Meanwhile, Lotso was found by an old garbage truck driver who reminisced about having a Lots-O-Huggin Bear toy as a kid. He tied Lotso to the front of his garbage truck with numerous dead flies. Along for the ride were other tied up toys who were filthy and worn out from the weather, bugs, and mud. One of the toys tell him that he might want to keep his mouth shut.

It is currently unknown what happens to Lotso after the film. He most likely spends the rest of his life tied to the truck, eventually being thrown away after being worn out by the elements. Even if he did escape, he would likely remain an outcast; a fate he more than deserves because of his crimes.

### Personality

At first, Lotso seemed like a caring, welcoming, friendly, individual, and possessed all of the good qualities of the stereotypical soft teddy bear. This was further emphasized by his strawberry aroma and his hugging of Buzz Lightyear (hence his name Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear) when the toys first arrived at Sunnyside Daycare. He even went so far as to "promise" the toys that different kids at the daycare center would continue to play with them and that they would never feel unloved or rejected.

However, this facade merely concealed his true nature later in the film. Lotso was eventually revealed to be a sadistic, conniving, rage-driven, irredeemable dictator and prison warden, ruling Sunnyside with an iron fist and imprisoning new toys in the Caterpillar Room to test their ability to experience the abuse of the reckless and destructive children there, while he sits comfortably in the Butterfly Room. This nature was mostly brought about by his perceived betrayal from Daisy. However, he was considered to be a kind-hearted friend to Chuckles and Big Baby before they were accidentally abandoned and subsequently replaced. Due to his painful past, Lotso possessed a negative philosophy about being a toy, thinking of toys as nothing special and created for future disposal (which is somewhat accurate because toys tend to be given away and sometimes even discarded by their owners the moment they are outgrown by them).

While in power as the head toy at Sunnyside, he also seemed to develop nihilistic tendencies as evidenced by his statement that all toys were ultimately going to be tossed out like garbage with no salvation. He did not display any mercy to toys that resisted, opposed, helped other toys escape, and did not follow his views, with examples being breaking Chuckles the Clown and the Chatter Telephone, forcing Stretch to push the toys into the dumpster, disowning Ken for not agreeing with Lotso's view that there were hundred million Barbie dolls like Molly's, and punching Big Baby with his mallet for being attached to their former owner again. Additionally, by destroying Big Baby's old pendant, Lotso showed that he not only wanted to forget his relationship with Daisy and pretend it never existed, but he also wanted to destroy all of Big Baby's connections to Daisy and essentially all toys' connections to their owners. This would imply he did not really care about Daisy herself, but only the attention she gave him.

Lotso is also shown to be a coward, as when he begs Big Baby to wait after Big Baby throws him to the dumpster, finally having enough of his cruelty. At the landfill, despite seemingly showing grateful feelings toward Woody and Buzz for saving him from the shredders, Lotso still held on to his beliefs that children would eventually discard their toys out of boredom and disinterest without realizing the physical and emotional pain they are causing to the toy, as evidenced when he refused to press the emergency stop button that, had he pressed it, would have supposedly led to his redemption by sparing Woody and his friends from their fiery death in the incinerator.

Ultimately, Lotso is a spiteful and disheartening toy with a heart of stone and incapable of redemption.

## Trivia

* Unlike other *Toy Story* villains, who were either tragic or amoral, Lotso is the only Toy Story villain to be considered purely evil. He remorselessly tortures, imprisons, subjects new toys to being broken by toddlers, and crosses the Moral Event Horizon with sadistic relish: betraying Andy's toys and leaving them to burn in an incinerator after they risked their lives to save him.
* Lotso is easily the most evil villain in the *Toy Story* franchise.
* In a test screening, the audience considered Lotso to be sympathetic due to his backstory and wished that he redeemed himself. The directors' response was to make small changes to increase his cruelty (such as him persuading Big Baby that his owner did not love him) to show that his backstory did not excuse his actions and that he deserved his ultimate fate.
* Lotso is the only *Toy Story* villain to be considered a Complete Monster.
* Lotso is one of the four Pixar villains to be Pure Evil, along with Professor Zündapp, Syndrome, and Miles Axlerod.
* Lotso will become the main villain in *Thomas and Twilight Sparkle's Adventures of Toy Story 3.*
* Lotso will return to get his revenge on Thomas, Twilight and Woody in *Thomas and Twilight Sparkle Goes to The Toy Shop,* which he join forces with Master Jack, Stinky Pete and Emperor Zurg.

* Lotso shares a lot of character traits with Stinky Pete from *Toy Story 2*. They both seemed to be loving at first but were eventually revealed to be bad. This is mainly due to a sense of feeling rejected or unloved, which were seen in both.
* Coincidentally, the music that played during Lotso's defeat was the same music heard during Stinky Pete's defeat.
	+ However, Lotso is more malicious than Stinky Pete (who has redeeming qualities), as while Stinky Pete only wants to be appreciated and loved, Lotso simply wants other toys to get hurt and tries to get Woody and his friends killed in the incinerator, even though they freed him from the golf bag.
	+ Lotso's fate of having to live on a truck's grille mirrored Stinky Pete ending up in a backpack, although Stinky Pete's was happier in a sense, now being owned by Amy.