The Brave Little Toaster was a book before it was a movie. Before the book, there was not simply the toaster, but many toasters, whose stories never got told.

When you watch The Brave Little Toaster, think of the toasters who stayed home, did their job, and kept this country running, engaging in subversive forms of invisible labor, like burning images of religious figures into the toast for people to report to the Enquirer.

Remember the Maillard reaction, and the solace toast represented to aristocracy and middle class of the Industrial Revolution.

Your toaster decided to be brave too and has left to join the revolution. Show solidarity by consuming untoasted bread for the duration of your life.

The Brave Little Toaster seems a little too brave — maybe they work for the other side? Let’s watch The Toaster Who Recorded Our Conversations for Russia.

See how brave the little toaster is when confronted about the breakfast sandwich maker who someone brought in as an office Secret Santa, and asserted that polyamory is essential to the sustainability of our movement, in order to have an affair with your father and destroy this family.

The Toaster Who Stole My Job never got made. Who do you think invented Tostum before the toaster came along and did it cheaper? The Egyptians, that’s who.

Let’s watch The Brave Little Toaster’s Annual Tax Shelter Gift From Mom and Dad, without which the toaster would be living off crumbs.

Let’s talk about The Brave Little Toaster‘s Decentralized Anti-Consumerist Agenda That Became Them Starring in Their Own Feature Film.

Beauty and the Beast teaches that only when a member of the ruling class is turned into a beast, because he refuses to let an enchantress disguised as an old hag stay at his castle for the night, are his servants transformed into talking household items. Instead of confronting this as the core conflict of our movement, The Brave Little Toaster and friends perpetuate the lie that they were always talking appliances, whose sole mission is a joyful pilgrimage through the capitalist inferno to reunite with their estranged Master.

They fight, they fuck, they toast, they wake up and do it again.

The Brave Little Toaster descends into the false identity of a toaster and is made an icon of how appliances should behave, to keep other appliances in line. It can no longer make toast. It is filled with the dirt and debris of too many adventures.

In Beauty and the Beast, Beast must learn to love another so that he and his staff can turn human again. In The Brave Little Toaster, The Master must learn nothing but to reap the mindless servitude of his talking appliances.

Who is the Brave Little Toaster free to love? A different appliance? Such decadence would upend their function based value system. Another Toaster? Nobody owns two toasters. A human? To do so is to admit that the Brave Little Toaster is also human.

The Brave Little Toaster’s Sexual Autonomy is too threatening to portray on screen. Air Conditioner voices sexual frustration towards Kirby the Vacuum through erotic innuendo. Yet when Toaster shares affection with Blanky, it is disrupted by excluded onlooker Lampy, whose inquiry they must quell as quickly as it arises, lest Lampy’s repression erupt after a life of deriving self-worth from illuminating on command. Toaster and Blanky dismiss their nascent awakening, likening it to the familiar heat of Lampy’s bulb, to affirm his supremacy.

Only certain inanimate objects get to take on human personalities in The Brave Little Toaster. Bathroom tiles, sandwich bags, pennies, toaster ovens — would be too complex. The appliances who speak are chosen by the author.

There are braver little toasters who can’t be here to celebrate. Know that while you dress up in your sexy tinfoil-and-crumbs outfits to stand in line and watch the floats at the parade at exclusive toaster themed rooftop dance parties, it’s because of them that National Toaster Day is on the calendar.

The creators of The Brave Little Toaster are not talking appliances, so why are they leading the conversation? Not that I should perform the labor of critiquing a film in which I do not see myself depicted.

Also, “appliance” rhymes with “compliance,” and if you think that is a coincidence, I’m afraid for you. You know what else it rhymes with?— “alliance.”

As much as you are entertained, do talking toasters have rights yet? What about the brave little toasters who are silenced because they don’t fit the Hollywood ideal of The Brave Little Toaster. How many brave little toasters must die, their story never told, to get representation?

The The Brave Little Toaster comforts us with assurance that those who abandon you will return if you chase after them-they won’t, and neither will your father, nor the grinding wheels of industry that led him to give up on this family, and move to the Poconos to work as a sustainable vegan dairy farmer in exchange for room and board from a lesbian app developer he claims is the next Steve Jobs but is only using him for mind control experiments.

Still, The Brave Little Toaster is a cartoon, so remember to have fun. That’s what being a kid is all about.

I’m not ruining this experience; I’m making you aware of the media machine shaping your perception of who’s The Brave Little Toaster, and who’s just The Toaster.

Let them eat toast.