Par for the course for the bad guy, Lotso doesn’t press the button, instead he proclaims, “Where’s your boy now” (referring to Andy, Woody’s owner) and flees, leaving the others to be destroyed. Trusting Lotso to press the button and save all their lives, Woody and Buzz push Lotso up the ladder and out of harm’s way. While on the conveyor belt, Lotso sees the “stop conveyor belt” button overhead. However, upon further reflection, I think Lotso’s betrayal changes the emphasis of this ending somewhat. Why take responsibility for environmentally disastrous actions of the past and try to implement changes now if “salvation” does not rely on our actions? My initial response was that this ending suggested that the only thing which will alleviate current environmental problems is the unlikely intervention of some being from another world. In an undeniably clever deus ex machina, the alien toys use their UFO Catcher skills to rescue the heroes. Initially, I was disappointed by the film’s ending. Reading this progression metaphorically, I think the imagery of their movement from a landscape piled high with trash, followed by their entrapment on a conveyor belt that is moving inextricably towards a fiery furnace is suggestive of the following trajectory: excessive waste and pollution to global warming to uninhabitable climates for humans. After arriving at the quintessential symbol for the used-up-ness of resources, the rubbish tip, the characters are bundled into the incinerator chute.

These strands come together in the climatic incinerator scene. However, the frontier they stand for is all used up, and the values upon which it rests, like the characters themselves, are threatened under Lotso’s over-bear-ing claw. Woody and Buzz refer to the American frontier (wilderness and space) and the American values tied to it, which encodes them the good guys. Lotso can be seen as a metaphor for capitalist systems of production and consumption, and he is coded as the bad guy. To recap on the Toy Story 3 interpretation so far. This is the third of 3 posts that considers how this theme is worked out in the third of the Toy Story saga. “ Reduce, reuse and recycle” seems to be at the heart of Toy Story 3 ‘s “environmental” theme.

Incinerator toy story 3