10 Examples Of How Progressive Disney Has Become
6. Bo Peep’s Agency
In Toy Story 1 & 2, Bo Peep barely features. She’s kind of a love interest to Woody, but even that standard romance storyline gets no development. She’s a tertiary character at best, being left out of all the adventures, while Woody is clearly the star.
In Toy Story 3, she’s absent entirely.
No one had an issue with this, particularly. Jessie gets prominence from Toy Story 2 onwards and nobody was really claiming that Toy Story lacked for female representation.
Still, bringing her back in Toy Story 4 turned out to be a stroke of genius.
She’s been reinvented, shaped by her history into a character we can root for. In the first two, she’s a dull character with a dull life. Having been abandoned though, she’s been forced to think and act for herself. She is Toy Story 4 - the movie just wouldn’t work without her.
It was a bold move to take an uninspiring side character and revamp them so completely, but it paid off in spades. To take a character with a pretty much nonexistent fanbase and grow her into a lead role in one of their biggest properties showed Disney are making a different kind of movie these days.