For this longtime fan, the Toy Story franchise, Pixar’s all-ages assault on funny bones and heartstrings, peaked with its magical second and third entries. But unlike many series that keep going long after the creative well has run dry, milking the cash cow until it goes belly up, this all-access pass to the hidden world of sentient toys has consistently delivered on its promise of wit, inventiveness, adventure and emotional depth. Even the underperformer of the stable, 2022’s origin-story spinoff, Lightyear, had its retro charms. 

Directed for the first time by series creator and regular co-writer Andrew Stanton, Toy Story 5 comes an astonishing 31 years after the original and does the enduring franchise proud. The movie’s captivating sweetness is hard to resist, showering its love on a pint-sized human character so out of step with her kid contemporaries she has difficulty making friends. Turning around the lonely life of 8-year-old Bonnie (voiced by Scarlett Spears) becomes an urgent mission for the toys.

Perhaps the key gain is that this scenario puts Jessie — national treasure Joan Cusack, returning to features after a quiet stretch of semi-retirement and bringing warmth, plucky spirit and tender vulnerability to her voiceover work — in charge. Bonnie is now the third-generation owner of Jessie and the red-headed cowgirl generally takes on a prominent role in the child’s elaborate play fantasies, like the celebrant of a wedding sabotaged by a poisoning plot. But Jessie is stymied by a harsh truth before she even comes up with a plan. 

While attempting, by invisible means, to nudge the twin boys who live next door to include Bonnie in their games, Jessie discovers that the neighbors are too glued to their devices to pay her any attention. 

Conferring with some abandoned toys — bitter and traumatized, dreading their fate in a landfill graveyard — Jessie is bluntly informed that “the age of toys is over.” She scrambles up onto a rooftop, where her eyes are opened by the sight of children through bedroom windows all over town, their faces lit by the glow of their screens. “Extinction! Not again!” wails fretful dinosaur Rex (series stalwart Wallace Shawn) when Jessie shares the grim forecast.

The situation gets even worse once Bonnie’s concerned parents try to connect their daughter with friends by buying her a Lilypad, a child-appropriate smart tablet in frog-like casing, voiced with slappably perky self-satisfaction by Greta Lee. The personalized screen instantly becomes Bonnie’s whole world, with Jessie and the gang left in a heap on the floor. But the cowgirl refuses to believe Bonnie’s new tech fixation is more than just a phase.

While Bonnie is learning that online friendships don’t always translate neatly to real-world playdates, the screenplay by Stanton and co-director Kenna Harris cooks up a way to get Jessie across town to the farmhouse where her original owner Emily once lived. The melancholy reminder that she was donated when Emily outgrew her sets off an anxious spiral in Jessie. 

Having gone from Emily to Andy — who gave her to Bonnie when he went off to college at the end of Toy Story 3, a movie that absolutely wrecked me — Jessie despairs at the possibility of another abandonment: “I can’t do this again. I can’t love another kid just to find out I never mattered.” 

This is a prime example of the Pixar canon’s ability to weave real feeling into the scenario, without sacrificing humor or derring-do. The enchanting woodsy and pastoral backgrounds when the action moves from the residential suburbs to the rural outskirts add to that poignancy, as do the dulcet tones of Randy Newman’s score. 

Jessie learns that Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris), a young girl not much older than Bonnie, lives with her family at the farm. But the discovery of a shed full of discarded toys hits hard. These range from a bendy pizza slice with sunglasses (a voice cameo by Bad Bunny) to three tech gadgets left behind each time Blaze moved on to the next shiny new device.

The most opinionated of these rejects is Smarty Pants, a basic toilet-training tech tool given an amusingly snarky attitude by Conan O’Brien. In exchange for Jessie’s help powering them up with new batteries, Smarty Pants, GPS-equipped toy hippo Atlas (Craig Robinson) and toy camera Snappy (Shelby Rabara) provide a crucial assist. They help Jessie see that despite Blaze’s susceptibility to the allure of the latest gizmo, she’s still creative and silly and present in her world in a way that too many other kids aren’t — rarely looking up from their devices or even talking as opposed to typing.

The ominous theme here is beware the machine, or as Woody (Tom Hanks) puts it with sad resignation: “Toys are for play. Tech is for everything.” Any parent who has ever endured a tantrum when screen time is cut off will feel the sting of those words. 

Luckily, Jessie is no quitter, especially once she becomes convinced Bonnie and Blaze will hit it off. She calls Woody for backup, despite him having passed on his sheriff’s badge to her in Toy Story 4. Now paunchy and balding, he’s still a resourceful quick thinker, not to mention newly fashion-forward in a red poncho that earns some eyerolls. Jessie also gets help from a squad of 50 Hi-Tech Edition Buzz Lightyears (Tim Allen), who come with their own hotspots and drone capabilities.

Of course it’s great to see the return of these core Toy Story characters, though the separate plot thread tracing the upgraded Buzz toys to a wrecked shipping container where they struggle out of their boxes feels like something from a different action-adventure movie. Stanton and Harris arguably take too long integrating the Buzz brigade into Jessie’s quest, but once all the toys start working together for a common goal, their collective can-do spirit proves stirring.

The same goes for the insanely catchy Taylor Swift song, “I Knew It, I Knew You,” co-written with regular collaborator Jack Antonoff, on the end credits.

Ultimately, the movie works because it has heart and conviction in the belief that tech toys are not innately bad. They can also serve to bring joy. As the latest model Buzz says: “Our mission on this planet is to make a child happy.” Even Lilypad is given her redemption. But the filmmakers also bring home the point that children need physical interaction and communication with other kids to help them develop and grow, a useful message that’s easy to endorse.