The Brave Little Toaster (film)

The Brave Little Toaster: Episode I is a 1987 American animated film adapted from the 1980 novel of the same name by Thomas Disch. The film was directed by Jerry Rees and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The film is set in a world where household appliances and other electronics have the ability to speak and move, pretending to be lifeless in the presence of humans. The story focuses on five appliances—a toaster, a lamp, a blanket, a radio and a vacuum cleaner—who go on a quest to search for their original owner.

The film was produced by Hyperion Pictures along with The Kushner-Locke Company. Many of the original members of Pixar Animation Studios were involved with this film, including John Lasseter and Joe Ranft. While the film received a limited theatrical release, The Brave Little Toaster was popular on home video and followed by two sequels a decade later.

Plot
Five members of a family of electrical household appliances—a radio, a lamp (Lampy), a blanket (Blanky), a vacuum cleaner (Kirby) and a toaster—live in an empty cabin located in the countryside. Each day, they await their master Rob, who is a person whom they have not seen for many years with a growing sense of abandonment. One one towards the end of July, when a car stops at the cabin and turns out to be a real estate broker placing a "for sale" sign, the appliances spiral into despair. Unable to accept that the Master would abandon them, Toaster decides that the crew should head out and find the Master. The appliances turn Kirby into a landship by connecting an office chair, a dead power strip and a Junko car battery to him and set out into the world, following the Radio's signal broadcasted from the city, where the Master lives.

From the cabin to the big city, the appliances have many harrowing adventures where they slowly learn to work together. Shortly after stopping to rest within a forest, a violent storm during nightfall blows Blanky up into the trees, and Lampy risks his life by using himself as a lightning rod to recharge the crew's dead battery. After recovering Blanky, the crew tries to cross a waterfall, only to have everyone fall in except for Kirby. Kirby dives after them and rescues them, and the appliances wash up into the middle of a swamp.

While having lost the chair, strip and battery, the crew resorts to pulling the disabled Kirby through the swamp. After almost drowning in a mud hole, they are rescued by Elmo St. Peters, the owner of an appliance parts store. At the store, they meet a group of partially dismantled, deceased appliances who have given up on hope and awaited being disassembled. After Radio is taken from the shelf and is about to have his radio tubes extracted, the appliances trick St. Peters, allowing them all to escape and head into the city.

The Master, whose name is revealed to be Rob, lives in an apartment as a young adult and is about to depart for college. The Master leaves with his girlfriend Chris to head back to the cabin to pick up the appliances to take with him. The modern electronics in the apartment become disheartened and jealous. When the appliances arrive at Rob's apartment, the modern appliances convince them that they are outdated and unusable, tossing them into the garbage, where they are shortly transported to Ernie's Disposal, which is a junkyard. Rob and Chris return home after believing his original appliances were stolen. A T.V., who is Rob's other appliance, broadcasts fake advertisements to convince him and Chris to look at Ernie's Disposal for Toaster and his crew.

At the junkyard, the appliances lose hope and put themselves at the mercy of a giant magnetic crane that picks up junk and places it on a conveyor belt that leads into a car crusher. When they discover that Rob is in the junkyard, they are encouraged and attempt to foil the magnetic crane in order to allow Rob to find them. After being thwarted several times, the furious crane picks up Rob himself as well as all of the appliances, except for Toaster, and drops them on the compactor's conveyor belt. In a climactic act of self-sacrifice, Toaster leaps into the compactor's gears and stops the machine from destroying his friends and Rob. Rob returns to the apartment with all of the appliances in tow, including the now mangled Toaster. Rob repairs the Toaster and takes all of them to college with him.

Cast and Characters
Main Cast
 * Deanna Oliver as Toaster: A gallant toaster and inspiring leader of the crew of five family members.
 * Timothy E. Day as Blanky: An electric blanket with an innocent, childlike demeanor.
 * Tim Stack as Lampy: An easily-impressed yet slightly irascible gooseneck lamp.
 * Jon Lovitz as Radio: A vacuum-tube-based dialed plastic A.M. radio whose picked up personality parodies of loud and pretentious singers and announcers.
 * Thurl Ravenscroft as Kirby: A very low pitched, individualistic Kirby upright vacuum cleaner who dons a cynical, cantankerous attitude towards the other appliances.

Additional Characters
 * Wayne Kaatz as Rob, the original human owner of the five appliances. Rob appears as a child in flashbacks for the first half of the film, but it is revealed that he has reached late adolescence and is departing for college.
 * Timothy E. Day as Young Rob, a little boy who is only viewed in flashbacks from the family.
 * Phil Hartman as the sarcastic, Jack Nicholson-inpsired Air Conditioner who resides in the cabin with almost the rest of the family. He loses his temper in an argument with them and explodes, but then, he is revived by Rob near the end of the film. Hartman also voiced the Peter Lorre-inspired Hanging Lamp, as seen in the appliance parts store, who does not believe in the family's optimism after years of having been forced to watch the death and mutilation of St. Peters' other appliances, including Blender, whose motor is sold to a man named "Zeke", who is also voiced by Stack.
 * Joe Ranft as Elmo St. Peters, one of the major antagonists of the film. He owns a spare parts shop where he disassembles even his own machines and sells the pieces.
 * Colette Savage as Chris, Rob's tomboyish girlfriend.
 * Jim Jackman as Plugsy, a pear-shaped lamp who is second-in-command of Mr. Tandy, who is the leader of the clan of modern machines who reside in Rob's apartment. While they were benevolent in the original novel, in the film, they are also formerly jealous and antagonistic towards the family.
 * Jonathan Benair as T.V., a black and white television who has moved to Rob's apartment and is an old member of the family.
 * T.C., Giant Magnet and Crusher are the voiceless villians who live at Ernie's Disposal and makes a career out of sending worn-out cars to their demise. They pursue the gang and attempt to destroy them.

Production
The film rights to The Brave Little Toaster, the original novel, were bought by the Disney Studios in 1982, two years after its appearance in print. After John Lasseter and Glen Keane had finished a short 2D/3D test film based on the book Where the Wild Things Are, Lasseter and Thomas L. Wilhite decided they wanted to make a whole feature this way. The story they chose was The Brave Little Toaster, but in their enthusiasm, they ran into issues pitching the idea to two high level Disney executives, animation administrator Ed Hansen, and head of Disney studios Ron Miller. During Lasseter and Wilhite's pitch, the film was rejected due to the costs of having traditionally animated characters inside expensive computer-generated backgrounds. A few minutes after the meeting, Lasseter received a phone call from Hansen and was asked to come down to his office, where Lasseter was told that his job had been terminated. The development was then transferred to the new Hyperion Pictures, the creation of former Disney employees Wilhite and Willard Carroll, who took the production along with them.

With Disney backing the project, The Brave Little Toaster soon turned into an independent effort; the electronics company TDK and video distributor CBS-Fox soon joined in. In 1986, Hyperion began to work on the story and characters, with Taiwan's Wang Film Productions for the overseas unit. The cost was reduced to $2.3 million as production began. Jerry Rees, a crew member on two previous Disney films, The Fox and the Hound and Tron, and a friend of Lasseter, was chosen to direct the film, and was also a writer on the screenplay along with Joe Ranft. Rees' inspiration for voice casting came from the Groundlings improvisational group, some of whose members (Jon Lovitz, Phil Hartman, Timothy Stack, and Mindy Sterling) voiced characters in the film. Lovitz and Hartman were stars of Saturday Night Live at the time. The color stylist was veteran Disney animator Ken O'Connor, a member of Disney's feature animation department from its establishment.

Halfway through the film, Donald Kushner thought that the nightmare scene should be cut from the film; due to the clown being extremely frightening to younger children. He also stated that the junkyard scene "Worthless" should be cut from the film too, due to one of the cars driving into a crusher on purpose, using a suicide reference. For unknown reasons, the scenes were left in the film.

Release
The Brave Little Toaster premiered in 1987 at the Los Angeles International Animation Celebration. The following year, it was shown at the 1988 Sundance Film Festival, garnering a Grand Jury Prize nomination. Though the prize went to Rob Nilsson's Heat and Sunlight, before the awards ceremony, Rees was told by several of the judges that they considered Toaster the best film but they couldn't give the award to a cartoon as they considered people wouldn't take the festival seriously afterwards. Ironically, Heat and Sunlight, unlike Toaster, would be forgotten in later years. Despite being a favorite with festival audiences, the film failed to find a distributor. Disney, who held the video and television rights, withdrew its official theatrical distribution, and premiered it on its new premium cable service instead. The buzz it generated at Sundance dissipated, and it only received limited theatrical airings through Hyperion, mainly at arthouse facilities across the U.S., and most notably at the Film Forum in New York City, in May 1989. Disney finally premiered the film on home video in July 1991 and, throughout the '90s onward, it enjoyed popularity as a rental amongst children as well as a Parent's Choice Award win. The VHS was re-issued in March 1994 in traditional Disney white clamshell packaging, followed by another VHS release in May 1998. The DVD was released in February 2003, to tie in with the film's 15th anniversary.

Reception
The Brave Little Toaster has garnered a 75% rating on the reviews website, Rotten Tomatoes. The Washington Post called it "a kid's film made without condescension", while the staff of Halliwell's Film Guide called it an "Odd fantasy of pots and pans with no more than adequate animation."

The film received an Emmy nomination for Best Animated Program in 1988. It was followed by two sequels, The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars (1998), also written by Disch, and The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue (1999). The two sequels were released out of chronological order; To the Rescue takes place before Goes to Mars.

Differences from Novel

 * In the novel, the air conditioner is only mentioned in passing as having died when it passed its expiration date, while in the film he dies from overheating, and is later repaired and revived.
 * The blanket was originally rescued from the tree by two squirrels.
 * The vacuum's name was changed from "Hoover" to "Kirby" and was the original leader of the crew, rather than the toaster.
 * The benevolent appliances in Rob's apartment are antagonistic in the film.
 * The appliances originally encounter a river and they find a boat to cross it, while in the film they encounter a waterfall and fail trying to cross.
 * Two characters named "Stereo" and "Ernie the Junkman" were planned to be in the film, but they were never released.
 * The original ending was notably different from the film: the appliances find a new owner, rather than their former one, to live with.