The Brave Little Toaster

Every time I bring up The Brave Little Toaster I either get a nostalgic or utterly confused reaction from friends, sometimes both. It would be one of those movies that you’d find on RTE 2 at 10am during the school holidays or nestled in a comfy corner of the children’s section of your tiny, local video shop. It’s an overlooked Disney classic and it just might have a special place in your heart, even if you haven’t realised it just yet.

Out story follows Toaster, Lampy, Radio, Blanky and Kirby; a few anthropomorphised household appliances as they leave their abandoned home in the countryside to search for their owner, to whom they refer to as ‘The Master’, in the big city. It’s a pretty basic plot, as plots go but don’t let the simplicity fool you. The Brave Little Toaster has been branded as one of Disney’s darkest animated films ever! If you thought the loss of Mufasa or Bambi’s mum was bad, well I’m going to make a rough estimate that 7 characters die mid song, one minor has it’s motor taken out with a screw driver and at the beginning Air Conditioner get’s so angry, he literally explodes. Why doesn’t Disney make movies like that anymore?

I feel odd to say but The Brave Little Toaster made me feel completely on edge, but not uncomfortably. There was a lot of spontaneity and a tonne of moments rational thought really couldn’t explain but it was entrenched in a deep and well thought out composition and structurally it was entirely sound.

I know I haven’t done the greatest job of explaining the entire basis of the film but some of it is inexplicable and it’s really something that you should take a mere 90mins to experience. It has the adventure, characterisation and of course, animation that I feel modern children’s ‘classics’ don’t address anymore. I’m really not surprised that, according to Wikipedia, many of the members of the Pixar studio including John Lasseter and Joe Ranft who both worked on Toy Story, along with many Pixar classics, worked to make The Brave Little Toaster possible. It’s truly an overlooked animation of epic proportions.