So, the guy being played by Newman is clearly a huge douchebag, but really, what he's doing isn't THAT BAD when you consider the fact he isn't aware that the toys are sentient.
Some nerd swipes a rare toy at a yard sale and tries to sell it to a Japanese museum, okay dick move but also not something I'd argue he deserves to have his entire career destroyed over. Yet we're supposed to root for his downfall because he actually kidnapped a sapient being, but HE DIDN'T KNOW THAT!
Same thing with Sid in the first movie. Yeah his propensity for mangling his toys perhaps suggests some mental health problems that should be addressed, but they are from his perspective inanimate objects. The Toy Story movies ask you to pass moral judgement on humans for injustices they inflict on thing that are inanimate from their perspective, only because we the audience are aware that secretly they are in fact living being with wills of their own. But that fact is something the toys intentionally keep hidden from humans, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW IT'S WRONG TO THROW AWAY MY RATTY OLD TEDDY BEAR IF I'M NOT AWARE IT HAS A SOUL!?!?!?!?
This is just "I didn't realize it was bad to enslave people because I didn't think they were sentient" through another lens, tbh.
I think it's a bit different when the "people" in question are Mr. Potato Head
Tagline material
This assumes that enslaved peoples were in any way keeping it a secret that they were sapient beings.
And that enslaved people actually loved the slavery
You're not wrong but Toy Story is pro slavery and always has been
The toys are sentient but they have no agency of their own, they only want to be property of a child, they're slaves who want to be slaves and hide their own sentience behind a vast conspiracy
The entire premise of Toy Story has rubbed me the wrong way since I was a kid
Toy Story 4(?) is about toys who build their own society without kids and live independently.
It’s also a horror film about a 5 year old child capable of creating sentient lifeforms that do not consent to their own existence and become immediately suicidal.
These films are super messed up, based on a concept that did not need to be dived further into.
you don't need to ban teaching people to read if you genuinely believed that in 18 dickety whatever