Toy Story 5 Blinks at Yet Another Toy-pocalypse: Review

Even in this franchise-crazed world of ours, the existence of a fifth Toy Story movie feels… excessive. Yes, since the original 1995 adventure, these movies have always used their essential premise as a rich opportunity to explore deeper themes around aging, loss, and death. That’s not subject matter with a shelf life, but what Toy Story 5 reveals is that this approach may have indeed peaked with Toy Story 3 — and that we may have found the limit to what a toy’s perspective on the world has to teach us.

This fifth Pixar adventure opens with most of the original gang enjoying life with Bonnie, the little girl who received them from Andy at the end of Toy Story 3. Bonnie still enjoys playing with her old favorites, but she is getting a little older, and as an eight-year-old she’s been struggling to make friends of the human variety. Cue a new existential threat for Jessie (Joan Cusack), Buzz (Tim Allen), and the rest of their brethren… Technology.

Up until now, Bonnie has managed to avoid being like the other kids of the world, transfixed by screens — a situation which is both our current reality and, in the world of the film, an apocalyptic threat for analog entertainment. As at least one now-abandoned plaything puts it, “The age of toys is over!” Like a virus, phones and tablets are turning the children of the world into blank-faced zombies — and in an effort to help Bonnie fit in better, her parents have gotten her a Lilypad device, which has online gaming and social networking capability.

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Lilypad, voiced by Greta Lee, splashes into Bonnie’s room with an easy fix for Bonnie’s friendship issues; through Lilypad’s apps, Bonnie joins a group chat with three other girls from her dance class, and even gets an invite to her first sleepover. Yet even at that age kids can be cruel, especially towards other kids who still like to play with dolls. And as Bonnie faces the brutality of her peers, her toys are forced to face yet another change to their once-comfortable status quo.

Woody (Tom Hanks) — now a “lost toy” who works with Bo Peep and Duke Kaboom to help other toys in need — does return to help with this latest crisis. But Toy Story 5 truly belongs to Jessie, as she faces rejection from yet another kid like a three-time divorcée who’s about to delete her dating apps and get a very short haircut.

Joan Cusack’s voice performance is a potent reminder of what a wonderful talent she is (hopefully we won’t have to wait several years for her next film appearance). And to make sure the audience gets at least a little weepy, the movie once again weaponizes the emotional sucker-punch of Toy Story 2’s “When She Loved Me,” to remind us musically just how deeply Jessie has loved before. (Taylor Swift’s “I Knew It, I Knew You” only comes in for the end credits, and doesn’t have quite the same impact.)

Toy Story 5 (Pixar/Disney)

In addition to the old stalwarts, Toy Story 5 does add a few new toys to this universe, with the breakout favorite voiced by Conan O’Brien: During his recent Harvard commencement address, the comedy icon cheekly promoted his appearance as “a talking potty training gadget named Smarty Pants,” and although Smarty Pants doesn’t get too much opportunity for pathos, the role does confirm O’Brien’s talent for voice acting, enfusing the toilet roll-shaped device with a ton of personality.

Most of the other characters, new and old, don’t get much in the way of an arc. As the trailers have teased, Woody’s showing some signs of aging, but that’s presented as a bit of a one-off gag. Buzz, meanwhile, spends most of the movie dithering about asking Jessie to marry him (as much as the concept of marriage exists for two toys). There’s also a wild subplot that begins with a shipwrecked shipment of ultra-advanced Buzz Lightyears finding their way back to civilization — a storyline that comes to add demented flavor to the main plot, along with some of the movie’s most entertaining visuals.

Those visuals, though, come in service to a narrative that feels compromised by exterior limits. The harsh reality of tech’s impact on playtime gives Toy Story 5 some real momentum at the start, along with massive stakes. Unfortunately, technology can’t be the ultimate bad guy here: There’s a version of this movie that takes a very harsh view of such gadgets, the way 2021’s The Mitchells vs. the Machines did, but Netflix didn’t try to market the evil tech in that movie to kids. Meanwhile, Disney has teamed with educational gaming company LeapFrog to create a stripped-down version of the Lilypad tablet, on sale now.

This real-life Lilypad device seems to have no capacity for cyber-bullying, but it’s still functionally the kind of gadget that’s causing traditional toys to face their own obsolescence. (Yes, Disney also sold Lots-o-Hugging Bears from Toy Story 3, but Lotso’s core nature wasn’t inherent to his evildoing.) Even beyond the merchandising angle, though, the bleak truth is that the Toy Story movies are not technically science fiction. They take place in our world, and our world is a world now ruled by screens, a status quo which this story has no ambition to change.

So Toy Story 5 works its way to a place where the message isn’t “screens are killing our ability to connect with each other” but “what matters is connecting with the right people — and technology can even help with that.” It all feels a little forced, like a story about climate change ending with the sun beginning to shine, and keeps this movie from hitting the same existential heights as past installments in the series. Maybe it’s not toys, but the Toy Story movies, that are now obsolete.

Toy Story 5 arrives in theaters on June 19th. Check out the latest trailer below.