Screenshot: Pixar / Disney
It is not hard to hate Sid Phillips, the enfant terrible of Pixar’s groundbreaking 1995 CG animated film,
Toy Story. From the toys’ point of view, he is the devil incarnate, an 11-year-old anarchist who never met a plaything he couldn’t burn, explode, or Frankenstein into a bizarre, mutant lifeform. With his braces-clad sneer, his skull-emblazoned T-shirt and his bedroom stocked with ominous Army handbooks, Sid is the polar opposite of childhood innocence, an unholy force of nature who revels in destruction for destruction’s sake.
Or is he? Granted, Sid would not be anyone’s first choice for Most Huggable Child, but is he really an unambiguous personification of evil? Consider: What comes out of Sid’s desktop workshop the likes of a dinosaur/Raggedy Ann hybrid or a shaven, one-eyed doll’s head affixed to an arachnid-esque assemblage of Erector set girders may look horrific. But viewed from a loftier perspective, these creations might just