Toy Story 4: Where You've Possibly Seen Forky Before
Could the inspiration for Pixar's new character have come from Wall-E?
By now, all Pixar fans should know that most of their new characters will have appeared in earlier Pixar movies as hidden cameos. It's just how the studio operates and how they reward eagle-eyed fans, who will have spotted Doug from Up in Ratatouille and Lotso from Toy Story 3 in Up.
They've not always done it however, so it's not on the same level as their other recurring Easter Eggs and tropes, which is perhaps why there's not been the same obsessive culture around finding character hints as there is for spotting the Pizza Planet truck in every movie. In that respect, you can understand why some people might have missed the fact that Toy Story's controversial - or at least very strange - character, Forky the spork, has appeared in a Pixar movie before.
Back when Wall-E was released we got a scene in which the trash compacting robot was revealed to collect items of intrigue that he was particularly attracted to to add to his wall of treasures (where Toy Story's Rex was spotted, in fact). At one point, he retrieves a spork from his pack and gets confused when he has to decide whether to put it with the other forks or the other spoons he's already collected. In the end he lays it in the middle.
Now, this may not seem all that important and could be sneezed off as a coincidence - only there's a little too much in what Wall-E does that matches what we know of Forky. In the brief teaser, we know that Forky is traimatised by an existential crisis of identity, because he's been given a face and rebranded a toy.
His crisis, however, isn't just because of that: it's because of his very nature. As Wall-E so cleverly foreshadowed, every spork would have an identity crisis if it were sentient. It wouldn't know where it belonged: whether it was fork or spoon. And it seems that idea from the beautiful, romantic sci-fi has lingered with someone at Pixar since it was released.
It's unlikely the spork in Wall-E is the SAME one, of course, since it's far into the future, but you can probably expect some film theories to spring out of this suggesting that Wall-E collects Forky's corpse. Because there's nothing the Internet likes more than a dark Disney theory.
What do you think?