Then things go dark almost immediately. The socialist utopia is not even given one chance to shine. A door opens and a bunch of noisy, dirty, ugly kids run into the play space (the site of production) and mob the toys. They are pulled, thrown, crushed by the rage of the multitude. The toys then learn that Lotso is not a benevolent leader but a malevolent dictator, who maintains power by force (a secret police), camera surveillance (screens monitored by a cymbal-banging monkey), and mind control (the heartbreaking desubjectification of Buzz Lightyear). The rest of the movie is about escaping this totalitarian state and returning to the much less oppressive ownership society.
It continues from there. You must must must read the whole thing.
Today, Alison Willmore at IFC.com picked up on the madness/genius of Mudede (she calls his argument "thoroughly reasoned"), and countered:
If I may play along: The daycare is depicted as becoming a socialist utopia once Lotso is ousted. The toys that stay there come up with a system in which they share the labor of having to be played with by the toddlers. If Sunnyside is a metaphor for a socialist society, it's meant to be a corrupt one in which a dictatorial leader has used the language of socialism to enforce a system in which privileges are saved for those in his cadre.
Read the full IFC post here.
I love everything about all of this.
