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The Brave Little Toaster is a 1987 animated film produced by Hyperion Pictures, distributed by Disney, and based on a children's novel by Thomas M. Disch.
The film centers around five appliances - the titular Toaster, Lampy (a lamp), Kirby (a vacuum), Radio (guess), and Blanky (an electric blanket) - who live in a old cabin out in the woods. The appliances have been left behind by their Master, a young boy, and have been waiting for him to return for years. When the cabin is put up for sale, the appliances determine to go find the Master (who, unknown to them, is now a young man getting ready for college) by making a journey to the city.
Though it didn't get much of a theatrical release, it's still fondly remembered by many kids of the late '80s and the '90s, thanks to its airings on the Disney Channel and its home video release, and it's proved to be a popular enough film to grant two direct-to-video sequels, and neither of them really sucked. As a side note, some of the people behind this film (such as John Lasseter and Joe Ranft) went on to go work for another company specializing in heartwarming animated features...
WARNING: If you plan on seeing this film, please make sure you're not going to be replacing or throwing out any old appliances in the near future. You will regret it.
This film contains examples of:
- Adaptation Displacement: Not everyone remembers the book this was based on.
- Ambiguous Gender: The Toaster. This Troper believes that Toaster is actually a girl, though some would disagree.
- Berserk Button: "'Cause you're stuck in the wall!"
- Big Lipped Alligator Moment: At one point the movie successfully pulls off a BLAM within a BLAM.
- Conveyor Belt O Doom
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: Kirby leaping off a cliff straight into a waterfall in order to save the other appliances from drowning.
- Crowning Moment Of Funny: The Radio quoting Moby Dick.
Radio: Damn thee, thou accursed whale, from the depths of Hell, I stab at thee!
Kirby: Climb on, you idiot!
- Dark Is Not Evil: The appliances in Elmo Saint Peter's parts shop may be broken, tinkered with, and twisted by the events they have seen, but they are by no means evil. You COULD say that they're resigned to their fate in a fairly unhealthy, EXTREMELY macabre way, however...
- Department Of Redundancy Department: Sometimes Lampy speaks a little like this sometimes.
Lampy: All of a sudden, you're being so darn nice to him all of a sudden.
- Disney Acid Sequence: "The Cutting Edge (More More More)"
- Disney Death: The Toaster
- This might also apply to Lampy and the air conditioner.
- Family Unfriendly Death: Both the "B-Movie Show" and "Worthless" numbers. And in a particularly Nightmare Fuelerrific scene, Rob just misses being added to this list.
- Let's not forget the air conditioner, who more or less gets worked up to the point of aneurysm, and dies...on camera.
- He got better.
- The Eighties: Especially with the new appliances and electronics that appear in the movie.
- Five Man Band
- Getting Crap Past The Radar: In one scene, the TV, playing up his Insane Proprietor act, pulls some pictures out of a cabinet. They're pictures of a topless woman, with stars over her breasts, but they're only visible for a second.
- Also in the song "Worthless", the beach car originally sings the line "there were bikinis and buns filled with weenies". While it could just be reading too much into it, in the official soundtrack the line is changed to "there were bikinis and hot dogs and weenies", so apparently someone higher up caught on to the Double Entendre.
- The radio says "damn" and "hell".
- One of the sequels gave us this scene.
 They even managed to sneak in a few seconds of Sexophone.
- Gossipy Hens: The sewing machine
- Grumpy Bear: Kirby
- Hammerspace: The appliances' cords tend to disappear when they aren't being used
- Heroic Sacrifice: Hey, there's a reason this movie's called the Brave Little Toaster...
- Again, Lampy gets one of these too.
- Radio gets one in one of the sequels.
- Hey Its That Voice: Thurl Ravenscroft (Tony The Tiger and "Mr. Grinch" singer) as Kirby.
- Insane Proprietor - Done by the TV to get the Master to go to the junkyard.
- Jerk With A Heart Of Gold: Kirby
- Large Ham: Radio. And, how.
- Leitmotif: Each character has their own theme, making the film's underscore one of this troper's favorites.
- Lightning Can Do Anything: Like recharge a battery.
- Living Toys: More like living appliances, actually...
- Monster Clown: One shows up in the Toaster's brief Nightmare Dream.
- Motor Mouth: The radio.
- New Technology Is Evil: Literally. The "cutting edge" appliances try to off the main characters.
- Nightmare Fuel: This movie is packed full of nightmarish scenes. These include the air conditioner's blow out, the various nightmares, the deeply unnerving and upsetting flower scene, the various Family Unfriendly Deaths, etc. In fact was haunted by this movie when he was five, and he first saw it
- The Monster Clown in Toaster's dream is particularly notable; this troper doesn't have a fear of clowns, but after watching that scene he can understand why some people do. Despite not having watched the movie in years, just thinking about that clown and its Slasher Smile sends shivers down the spine.
- The magnet. Oh, god, the magnet.
- Forget the magnet, how about the Toaster's graphic mutilation in the inner workings of the trash compactor!? This troper saw the movie around age five and was unable to watch it again until about fifteen years later because of that scene.
- Even Kirby's aforementioned Crowning Moment Of Awesome is pretty terrifying (at least to this troper at four years old). He jumps off a waterfall!!
- One Word, literally: "...Run..."
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The air conditioner (a Jack Nicholson soundalike) and the hanging lamp (a Peter Lorre soundalike). Of course, what did you expect, what with impressionist extraordinaire Phil Hartman doing their voices?
- Ripped From The Phone Book.
- Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped: The song "Cutting Edge" is a pretty blantant Stealth Parody of the consumer culture of the 1980's. Given the kind of people that particular avenue spawned...
- In the novel version of The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, the main villain was an ancient hearing aid created by Albert Einstein, who went insane after being used by a Nazi party member, then escaped to Mars, inhabited a giant refridgerator, and amassed an army of "Populux" appliances, with the goal of returning to Earth and killing all the humans in revenge for planned obselesence schemes. Seriously.
- Staggered Zoom
- Tear Jerker: If the flower scene does not tug a few heartstrings, than you probably have none.
- Thank The Maker
- Viewer Gender Confusion: The Toaster. Just...the Toaster. Deanna Oliver voiced him.
- In the Latin Dub, that applies to Blanky too.
- JUST the Latin (American?) dub? I STILL don't know what Blanky is supposed to be.
- He was voiced by a 7-year-old boy.
- For the record, we are not the first to wonder about this. And yes, we will admit that debating the gender of machines is a bit silly.
- This is actually brought up in the original book. The Toaster specifically claims to be genderless, when asked by squirrels. The appliances were referred to in neuter gender ("it").
- Villain Song: Both of which are Crowning Moments Of Awesome:
- While they aren't exactly villains, the insane machines in "Like A Movie" (aka "It's a B-Movie") do a wonderful job of showing the horror of waiting to be taken apart for spares. And they aren't bad shadow puppeteers either.
- A more directly evil example is "Cutting Edge", where the new appliances sing an egotistic preview of their superiority to the main characters.
- Vindicated By Cable
- What Measure Is A Non Human: Don't. Get us. Started.
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