When the fourth entry in a decade-spanning franchise delivers a roughly 5-to-1 return on investment (a billion-dollar return on $200M in production costs), it’s practically guaranteed that a fifth entry will be greenlit, produced, and released theatrically, regardless of overall quality or even audience interest. Corporate leadership demands nothing less. Despite the usual financial pressures, Pixar’s leadership chose a quality-first approach to Toy Story 5, fine-tuning the screenplay over months and years and, once production began, reshaping the unfinished film through meetings with Pixar’s “brain trust,” virtual reshoots, and re-edits before signing off on the final, release-ready iteration. It’s turned Pixar Studios into a family-oriented animation brand without parallel.
Toy Story 5 opens roughly three or four years after Toy Story 4: No longer in kindergarten, the toys’ new owner, the eight-year-old Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) attends third grade at the local elementary school. Deeply introspective around other grade schoolers, Bonnie prefers creative play, making up fanciful stories involving her toys and staging elaborate reenactments in her backyard. Spending all that time inside her own head means Bonnie doesn’t have any age-appropriate friends, just kids at school who ignore her or neighbors who deliberately avoid a deeply insecure, near-mute Bonnie.
In turn, that sets up the central conflict: Old School Tech (three-dimensional toys in all shapes, sizes, and colors) and New School Tech (phones, tablets, and computers), specifically the popular LilyPad (Greta Lee), a tablet specifically designed for children and thus crammed with addictive instructional games. LilyPad’s group chat function allows Bonnie to bypass her awkwardness and commiserate with an already established friend group. Her older, non-modern toys gather dust, unused, disregarded, and typical for the Toy Story franchise, facing a new existential dilemma: Who are they without the unconditional love, attention, and reciprocity of a child?
Soon enough, Bonnie suffers from an all-too-common affliction: Buried in her LilyPad, Bonnie mentally and emotionally retreats from the physical world, a relatable, not quite fatal, but certainly bothersome malady facing parents navigating the unchecked proliferation of screens into our (and their) daily lives. But where Bonnie’s non-tech toys see a problem for both her and themselves, her parents see a neutral tool, a means for Bonnie to acquire meaningful friendships of her own. They’re more wrong than right.
Points and/or props to Oscar-winning Andrew Stanton (In the Blink of an Eye, WALL-E, Finding Nemo) and his co-writer and co-director, McKenna Harris, for centering the latest Toy Story entry on real-world concerns and complications and not on recycling the scenario involving Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear, and their personality clashes we’ve seen multiple times. Instead, Toy Story 5 feels, if not necessarily new, then refreshed, partly due to bringing a seemingly timeless story into the present or near-present, but mostly due to a key creative decision: Shifting the narrative focus from Woody and Buzz to Jessie (Joan Cusack), Bonnie’s onetime favorite toy turned semi-forgotten companion.
For the spunky, never-say-never Jessie, sneaking into Bonnie’s suitcase before the latter goes on a sleepover turns into a typically incident-filled adventure. Despite her best efforts, Jessie finds herself both lost and found, returned to her former owner’s home by a kindly couple. Now occupied by a different family, including Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris), a horse-obsessed preteen not much older than Bonnie. Blaze shares Bonnie’s preference for creative play over brightly lit screens. Jessie and her faithful companion, Bullseye, have to learn to overcome their anti-tech biases and ally themselves with a collection of discarded, early-gen tech: Smarty Pants (Conan O’Brien), a potty-training device, Snappy (Shelby Rabara), a digital camera, and Atlas (Craig Robinson), a GPS tracker, and find her way back to Bonnie.
Upgrading Jessie from a key supporting player in Woody and Buzz Lightyear’s ongoing story into the central protagonist in Toy Story 5 not only adds a new, much-needed spin on over-familiar, formulaic material. More importantly, it also pays narrative, thematic, and emotional dividends. Less concerned about her own well-being than Bonnie’s, Jessie wants nothing more than for Bonnie to acquire real-world friends of her own. Jessie rightly sees Bonnie’s newfound LilyPad obsessions and the virtual “friends” Bonnie finds there as a problematic, non-neutral threat, an obstacle to meaningfully engaging with the world.
A non-essential, if outright hilarious subplot involves a shipwrecked shipping container filled with unsold high-tech Buzz Lightyears. Stuck in demo mode, the 50-odd Buzz Lightyears jointly decide to follow their programming and find “Star Command.” Working in tandem and/or unison, the single-minded Buzz Lightyear hive mind builds transportation, disembarks in a port-of-call, and follows the equivalent of the North Star. Like their early-gen predecessor, an existential crisis awaits the Buzz Lightyear collective.
Addressing topical and/or universal concerns has been one key to the Toy Story franchise’s continued success. The fifth time around, Stanton and Harris center Toy Story 5 on our collective media and screen addiction. Less credibly, Stanton and Harris embrace moderation and accommodation as the only solution to our shared addiction to screens. While the real world might prove otherwise, this resolution provides Toy Story 5 with the satisfying conclusion that moviegoers both desire and likely need.
Toy Story 5 opens in theaters on Friday, June 19th, via Walt Disney Studios. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.
