The Brave Little Toaster  

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The Brave Little Toaster is a 1987 American-British animated musical film adapted from the 1980 novel The Brave Little Toaster by Thomas M. Disch. The film was directed by Jerry Rees. The film is set in a world where domestic appliances and other electronics come to life, pretending to be lifeless in the presence of humans. The story focuses on five anthropomorphic household appliances, which consist of a toaster, a lamp stand, a blanket, a radio and a vacuum cleaner, who go on a quest to search for their owner.

The film was produced by Hyperion Animation along with The Kushner-Locke Company. Many CalArts graduates, including the original members of Pixar Animation Studios, were involved with this film. The rights were acquired by Disney in 1982. John Lasseter, then employed at Disney, wanted to do a CGI film based on that, but it was turned down and he was terminated the following year. While the film received a limited theatrical release, The Brave Little Toaster received positive reviews and was popular on home video and was followed by two sequels: The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars and The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue.

Plot

Every day for two thousand days, a family of minor appliances, which include a sunbeam toaster, a radio, a tensor lamp stand named "Lampy", a blanket named "Blanky" and a hoover vacuum cleaner named "Kirby", hope to see Rob return home. On the two thousand and first day, the appliances are devastated to learn that a real estate broker is selling the house. Not wanting to accept the fact that the Master would abandon them, Toaster decides that the group should head out and find Rob. The appliances build Kirby into a carriage by connecting a power strip, an office chair and a car battery from a volkswagen beetle to him and set out into the world, following Radio's signal broadcasts from the city of Santa Clarita where Rob lives.

On their journey, the appliances encounter numerous harrowing adventures where they learn to work together. Shortly after stopping to rest within a forest, an evil clown nightmare and a violent storm wakes Toaster and the others, with the storm blowing Blanky up into the trees, and Lampy risks his life by using himself as a lightning rod in an attempt to recharge the group's dead battery. After recovering Blanky, they try to cross a waterfall, but everyone falls in except for Kirby, who dives after them and rescues them, and the appliances wash up into the middle of a swamp. After losing both the chair and the battery, the group resorts to pulling a disabled Kirby through the swamp. After losing their balance and almost drowning in a mud hole, they are rescued by Elmo St. Peters, the owner of an appliance parts store, where they get scared by a group of partially dismantled, worn-out revenant appliances, who have lost hope and are at risk of being disassembled or sold. When Radio is taken from a shelf and about to have his radio tubes taken out, the appliances frighten St. Peters by pretending to be a ghost and flee to Santa Clarita, while the disfigured dead appliances escape the store and quickly return to their owners.

Rob, who is now living in an apartment as a young adult and is about to depart for college, leaves with his girlfriend Chris to return to the cottage and retrieve the appliances to take with him. After secretly witnessing this, Rob's newer appliances in the apartment become resentful. When the appliances arrive at Rob's apartment, the newer appliances explain that they are "on the cutting edge of technology". After answering Toaster and the other four appliances their question of what they mean by singing their song to them, they kick them into the apartment's dumpster from the window, where they are shortly transported to Ernie's Disposal, a junkyard. Thinking that the cottage has been broken into and trashed, and his original appliances stolen, Rob and Chris return to his apartment, where his old black and white television, who originally lived in the cottage, broadcasts fictional advertisements to encourage Rob and Chris to go to Ernie's Disposal to find his appliances.

At the junkyard, the appliances are tormented by a maniacal crusher with its henchman, an evil tower crane with an electromagnet that picks up junk and places them on its conveyor belt that leads to the crusher. When they discover that Rob is in the junkyard, they are encouraged that he still needs them after all, and then, they attempt to foil the magnet in order to allow Rob to find them. After being foiled numerous times, the magnet decides to pick up Rob as well as his appliances, and drops them on the conveyor belt. Toaster risks his life by jumping into the crusher's gears to disable it just in time to prevent it from killing Rob and destroying his appliances. Rob survives and returns back to the apartment with all five appliances, including a mangled Toaster. Rob repairs Toaster and takes the five appliances with him to college, along with Chris.

See also





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The Brave Little Toaster" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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