At the end of “Toy Story 4” (2019), Woody, the control-freak cowboy doll with the pull-string-activated voice of Tom Hanks, bade farewell to his friends and, like a sheep at last surrendering to his shepherdess, set off with Bo Peep for fresh adventures in the wild. I wasn’t sorry to see him go, and I couldn’t fathom why it had taken an entire movie to convince him that his most stubbornly held ideal—his belief in a deathless bond between kids and their toys—was sentimental to the point of dangerous narcissism. He had outgrown a child’s room, and the series in turn had outgrown him. But, if Woody couldn’t let go, the storytellers at Pixar clearly couldn’t, either, and their effort to keep the “Toy Story” films going smacked of similar desperation. Even the most memorable new character, Forky (Tony Hale)—an endearingly daffy piece of plastic cutlery with a tendency toward self-harm—could only reinforce the sense that we were being served a load of flimsy, disposable goods.
It’s no surprise that Woody cuts his retirement short and returns for a decent stretch of “Toy Story 5.” And if his reunion with his unerringly loyal space-ranger pal, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), feels a bit obligatory, the movie itself—directed by Andrew Stanton, who wrote the script with Kenna Harris, the co-director—represents an improvement on its predecessor, not least because it has a clear and creatively fertile reason for being. A couple of years have passed since the events of “Toy Story 4,” and Woody’s friends, led by Buzz and the sparky cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack), are still adored by their equally adorable owner, Bonnie (Scarlett Spears). But Bonnie, now a sensitive eight-year-old, is having trouble making friends, mainly because contemporary technology has transformed the very notion of child’s play. In one chilling early scene, the toys peek out Bonnie’s window and see all the houses around them lit up, from within, by the spectral glow of personal digital devices. The kids, entranced by their phones and tablets, don’t meet up anymore to play dress-up dolls, kick a ball around, or even just talk—not with whole virtual worlds and endless distractions at their eager little fingertips. Stanton, who, in the Pixar masterpiece “WALL-E” (2008), brilliantly mocked the sedentary, screen-addicted human gluttons of the future, has made a movie about the perils of present-day internet addiction.
Bonnie, at least, is still a fan of old-fashioned plastic-based and plushie toys, and the wondrous bursts of make-believe they can inspire—rendered here in vibrant, hallucinatory sequences with a watercolor-influenced style. But when her parents buy her a frog-themed tablet called Lilypad (Greta Lee), she, too, is glued to the screen in no time. Lily smirkily asserts her state-of-the-art superiority to the newly neglected Jessie, especially when it comes to improving Bonnie’s social life: within moments, she has virtually connected the girl to several other kids in the neighborhood. Lily can do just about everything a phone can do—send text messages and images, arrange package deliveries—and can do them without the authorization of Bonnie and her parents, making her far more powerful than past “Toy Story” antagonists such as Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear and Gabby Gabby. Those were embittered old-school toys, relics of the past who longed simply to be held and hugged. Lily is, ominously, a creature of the present and a harbinger of the future. In the ominous words of Woody, weighing in from the wilderness via two-way radio: “Toys are for play, but tech is for everything.”
Ingeniously, Stanton and Harris weaponize a foundational conceit of the “Toy Story” universe—that inanimate objects can have freedom of will, thought, and movement—in order to feed our anxieties about the insidious autonomy of tech and A.I. For parents of young kids, “Toy Story 5” might prove an even more triggering experience than the Pixar coming-of-age films—“Inside Out” (2015), “Inside Out 2” (2024), the jubilant “Turning Red” (2022)—that have imaginatively colonized the inner lives of children and teen-agers. As I watched Stanton’s film, my thoughts drifted to my daughters’ compulsive screen habits, my attempts to curb their iPad addiction by nudging them toward books and toys. (Perhaps Stanton’s next Pixar caper should explore the hidden world of secretly sentient literature: “A Book’s Life.”) I thought about the sensational popularity of the gaming platform Roblox, which, being open to users as young as five, has often been sued for enabling the exploitation of minors. Then, after the film was over, I flashed back to the Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda’s very different, older-skewing animated fantasy, “Belle” (2022)—which unfolds largely within a fictional metaverse where users hide behind elaborate digital masks, chase social-media stardom, and fend off trolls of every persuasion—and idly wondered if this were the future that our children, and Bonnie, had to look forward to.
Pixar being Pixar, there’s only so much tech-dystopia darkness that even the most cutting-edge “Toy Story” movie can countenance. Lily, with her high-tech powers of deception, can arrange for Bonnie’s toys to be boxed up and removed from the bedroom, but in the end she’s more misguided than truly nefarious. She doesn’t turn into a pint-sized HAL 9000 or a psycho-killer Alexa, and she does care about Bonnie’s welfare, deep down in her silicon heart. Happily, Bonnie, for her part, doesn’t fall prey to an e-stalker, though she is subjected to some sneering group-chat abuse, which teaches her an important lesson about bullying, peer pressure, and the instability of online-only friendships.
Fortunately, there’s a real, true friend waiting for her: an equally sweet girl, Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris), who shares Bonnie’s love of analog toys and even briefly inherits her boxed-up collection. The action thus spills out of one house and into another, in much the same way that it did in the very first “Toy Story” (1995). Successive chapters have forced the characters to travel greater and greater distances, and to coördinate dangerously elaborate rescue missions in far-flung locations: playgrounds and pizza parlors, toy stores and day-care centers, antique shops and carnivals. (There’s an amusing roadside gag here that pokes fun at the sheer implausibility of an army of toys, whose movements are ostensibly invisible to the human eye, covering so much ground undetected.) But one of the more clever innovations in “Toy Story 5” is its use of the internet to bridge, or even collapse, those distances. Digital shortcuts abound; tech really is for everything.
One needn’t even be a tablet like Lily to harness the efficiencies of the web. At Blaze’s house, Jessie and the gang meet an interactive potty-training toy called Smarty Pants, a toilet-paper roll with light-up eyes and the voice of Conan O’Brien, who spends the movie gamely dropping one mildly scatological one-liner after another. It’s useful to the plot that Smarty Pants can send and receive messages, though his connection is weak, his battery life wanes, and at times you wonder if he’s defective, as opposed to merely defecative. But the more crucial role that he plays is one of reconciliation. Not all devices are evil, the toys realize, and even the best machines—like even the best toys—will eventually break down and get tossed aside for a shiny new model. This declaration of solidarity, as stirring as it is, ultimately softens and sentimentalizes the film’s trenchant earlier critiques. Even the semi-villainous Lilypad is granted her redemptive moment: a reminder that Pixar is ultimately, like its parent company, Disney, in the business of manufactured reassurance.
Stanton, by far the most science-fiction-oriented of Pixar auteurs, has a habit of merging high-tech futurism and grand-scale optimism. His previous picture, the Hulu-released live-action drama “In the Blink of an Eye” (2026), was a peculiarly limp example: a millennia-spanning triptych of tales that I remember best for an image of a melancholy astronaut (Kate McKinnon) travelling through deep space, with only an A.I. companion for company. “Toy Story 5” is both a superior film and a richer meditation on technology and its discontents, and, if it backs away from the grimmer implications of its premise, even that faltering, consoling gesture feels born of a deep respect for the series’ history. The new movie peers forward and backward with equal intensity: one daringly out-there subplot, featuring a multitude of unclaimed, digitally souped-up Buzz Lightyear action figures making their way through the wilderness, harks back to an eerily existential sight gag from “Toy Story 2” (1999), in which Buzz came face-to-face-to-face with a store shelf’s worth of his own prepackaged kind.
That’s not the only respect in which “Toy Story 2,” one of the franchise’s finest entries, haunts this particular story. Stanton’s film comes trailing up-to-the-minute pop-music bona fides: a new Taylor Swift song (“I Knew It, I Knew You”) on the soundtrack, a deft vocal performance by Bad Bunny as a toy with the gloriously self-explanatory name Pizza with Sunglasses. But its most memorable use of song has no need for novelty. It involves a gentle reprise of “When She Loved Me,” the Randy Newman-written, Sarah McLachlan-performed tune that, in “Toy Story 2,” laid bare Jessie’s heartbreaking owner-origin story—one of abandonment, loss, and persistent, unshakable love. In revisiting that story here, Stanton taps into fresh reserves of emotion and also invests the simple, familiar image of a tire swing dangling from a tree with a vast totemic significance. It’s another worn-out toy from a decidedly analog era whose pleasures, though seemingly outgrown, are just one burst of childlike curiosity away from rediscovery. ♦
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