The dominating themes of Pixar's Toy Story films are vanity, mortality, and separation – but they also share the themes of infantile sadism and the partial object that I want to investigate further in Toy Story 3. I want to claim that Toy Story 3 depicts the partial object as such as that which animates the human subject, allegorized in the character of Mr. Potato Head whose detachable partial objects seem, in this film’s rather original visual fantasies, to be his very substance. The partial object as substance will be related to Lacan’s conception of the independent partial object, the lamella, as a metaphor for libido. My investigation into the sadism at work in playing will be informed not only by Lacan’s theory of the partial object, but also by Melanie Klein’s as well as by D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object. Further, I will try to show how the child (infant/toddler) in Pixar’s universe represents some monstrous surplus energy, and how society is seen as based on the control of that energy.