Toy Story 5: screen-time overtakes creative play in Pixar’s imaginative tear-jerker

The full-circle ending of Toy Story 3 (2010, following the first two films in 1995 and 1999 respectively), Pixar Animation’s flagship series, rounded off one of the more perfectly realised trilogies in movie history. But Pixar’s parent company, Disney, was always unlikely to leave billions of potential dollars on the table. And so, inevitably, in 2019 came the funny, touching but essentially redundant part four (Sheriff Woody has an identity criss. Again.). Toys (and merch and Happy Meals and so on) don’t sell themselves. 

With that in mind, Toy Story 5 impresses not only in maintaining its predecessors’ elevated standards but by upgrading its topicality. Alongside state-of-the-art animation and four-quadrant fun, the franchise’s piledriving emotional resonance has always been built around eventual obsolescence – Woody, Buzz and co as malleable metaphors for the putting away of childish things, parents outgrown by their offspring, and more.  

But what if toys themselves are now innately obsolete? Sure, kids today game, but do they actually play anymore? Or has technology snuck in from infancy – exhausted mums and dads propping up mealtimes with digital distractions that can hijack not just youthful engagement and entertainment, but youth itself? Admittedly, it’s a slightly old-fashioned, preachy stance, but as Woody wearily observes, “Toys are for play. But tech is for everything…” 

The gang’s current eight-year-old, Bonnie, finds her own creative, practical playtime isn’t winning her any new friends IRL. Desperate, she quickly succumbs to shiny new frog-shaped tablet, Lilypad, who looks to shortcut Bonnie’s popularity online and hook her to the screen. Effectively Lily here functions like the adolescent emotions who take over teenage Riley in Inside Out 2 (2024), assuming she knows best for her host, much to the old guard’s horror.  

An overstuffed plot, involving another playdate-starved kid, Blaze, who now lives in cowgirl Jessie’s first owner Emily’s old home, four sequels worth of sidekicks, plus a fleet of abandoned hi-tech Buzz Lightyears on the loose, takes a while to hit stride. Wisely, directors Andrew Stanton, Kenna Harris and their writing team put Jessie centre stage, poignantly tapping back into her Toy Story 2 abandonment. Tear-duct terrorists one and all, they bookend a scene to that film’s treasured ‘When She Loved Me’ sequence, guaranteed to break hearts all over again. 

And so, when the film finally takes flight, itself embodying and espousing a synergy of pure imagination and cutting-edge inspiration (given Pixar’s essential business, computers could never be the out-and-out villain here), it’s almost impossible to resist. On this kind of form, we’re all just Pixar’s playthings. Game over – presumably until the next reboot. 

► Toy Story 5 is in UK cinemas 19 June.