‘Toy Story 5’ review: The end of playtime as we know it

Directed by Andrew Stanton, Toy Story 5 turns toys vs. tech into a funny, moving story about loneliness and the survival of imagination.

Toy Story 5 has absolutely no business working as well as it does. This is, after all, the fifth entry in a franchise that has already ended beautifully at least twice, arguably three times, depending on how charitable one feels about Toy Story 4.

The original Toy Story was a miracle of technological novelty and emotional precision. Toy Story 2 deepened the premise into something almost mythic, asking what it means for a toy to be loved, preserved, discarded, remembered. Then Toy Story 3 took that question to the edge of mortality and gave a generation of viewers the cleanest possible goodbye. Eventually, Toy Story 4 waltzed in, somewhat controversially, to ask whether Woody could have a life after ownership.

So with Toy Story 5 opening this weekend, one’s first instinct is understandable suspicion. What now? What fresh existential crisis can possibly be wrung from these plastic, plush, pull-string little vessels of childhood feeling? Is there some new ache that remains un-excavated? Are we simply watching intellectual property walk itself around the block again because the shareholders have a quarterly meeting and nostalgia still tests well?

The film’s answer to these inevitable questions is unnervingly simple. What if the toys have not merely been replaced by other toys, or outgrown by children, but displaced by an entirely different model of childhood itself?

That is the cleverness of Toy Story 5. The pitch sounds almost catastrophically obvious. Toy meets tech. The toys face off against a smart tablet. Playtime, now threatened by screen time. In the wrong hands, this would be an insufferable lecture. A finger-wagging, “kids these days” sermon about devices, attention spans, and the tragic disappearance of wholesome imagination. All of it delivered by a multinational entertainment company that would also very much like you to download its app.

The true story of Toy Story 5.

But the film is smarter than that. Mainly because its subject is not really technology. Its subject is loneliness. More specifically, it is about the moment when a child’s private imagination collides with public social pressure. It is about the terrifying age when a kid begins to wonder whether the things that make them happiest also make them embarrassing.

That, I think, is why Toy Story 5 works so well, despite the odds. It understands that children do not always outgrow toys because they stop loving them. Sometimes they perform outgrowing toys because other children teach them to.

The emotional center of this story is Jessie (once again voiced impeccably by national treasure Joan Cusack), and that choice is everything. Woody has carried this franchise for decades, but his existential quandaries have now been thoroughly explored. Buzz, too, has had his crises of identity, delusion, loyalty, and purpose.

Jessie, meanwhile, has always carried one of the series’ deepest wounds. Her backstory in Toy Story 2 remains one of Pixar’s great emotional gut-punches. You might recall how instantly she was loved by her first owner, Emily. Only to be abandoned when Emily grew up. It is an entire childhood, compressed into a song and a box.

In Toy Story 5, Jessie faces that abandonment yet again, but in a more complicated form. Bonnie hasn’t grown up completely. She’s not packing for college or donating old toys after years of neglect. She’s still a child, still capable of play. Still emotionally attached to Jessie. The opening scenes establish this with almost cruel sweetness. Bonnie promises Jessie she will love her forever, even when she’s mad, sad, or accidentally leaves her outside. It’s the sort of childhood vow that feels eternal in the moment and impossible in the long view.

Then the movie really begins.

It’s been 16 years since Andy gave his toys to Bonnie in Toy Story 3, but the cinematic continuity has been mostly frozen ever since. That means Bonnie is only eight now. She’s still shy. She wants friends. But the kids across the street and the girls from dance class aren’t living in the same imaginative register she is. They’re on devices. In group chats. They’re gathering socially in digital spaces before they ever gather physically. Bonnie’s problem, then, is that her more tactile imagination has become socially risky.

Jessie, now the sheriff of Bonnie’s room, tries to solve this the only way she knows how: through play. She believes Bonnie needs a real friend, someone physically present, someone who will see and share her imaginative world. Here enters Lilypad, the new smart tablet, who sees the same problem and offers a different solution. Bonnie needs connection, and connection, in Lilypad’s understanding, means access. Friend requests. Group chats. Games. Presence on “The Pond.”

This is where the film becomes interesting. Lilypad isn’t a traditional villain like Sid, Stinky Pete, Lotso, or Gabby. She’s not some evil technology, cackling in the corner as childhood burns. She’s a competing philosophy of care. Bonnie’s parents bought her to help their child connect, and she sincerely believes she’s doing that. She’s efficient, responsive, cheerful, always listening, always optimizing. She gets Bonnie invited to a sleepover in seconds, which seemingly makes Jessie look obsolete.

But Lilypad’s limitation is also the film’s thesis. Sure, she can optimize contact, but she can’t guarantee intimacy. She can get Bonnie into the group chat, but she can’t know whether the group is kind. She can help Bonnie keep up, but she can’t tell whether “keeping up” means becoming less herself.

“Oh, you still play with toys?”

In one crystallizing scene, Bonnie brings Jessie and Bullseye to a sleepover, and the response from another child is devastating in its casualness. “Oh, you still play with toys?” There it is. Not cruelty on a grand operatic scale, of course. Just the tiny social blade by which children learn shame. Bonnie, humiliated, distances herself from the toys and clings to Lilypad. She rejects Jessie, and not even because she no longer loves Jessie. She’s just trying to survive the room.

For Jessie, of course, this is catastrophic. It feels like Emily all over again. The film gives her a line that cuts right to the bone: “Am I just no good at being a toy?” And that’s the secret fear underneath the entire character. Not merely “Will I be abandoned?” like Woody. But “Does abandonment prove I failed? That I lack worth?”

That question gives Toy Story 5 its emotional urgency. When it comes down to it, Jessie’s true fear is that she’s failed to matter enough. She wanted to make a difference for Bonnie. She wanted to be there at the right time, in the right way. And when Bonnie pushes her away, Jessie interprets that as proof of uselessness.

The film then sends Jessie and Bullseye into the world of Blaze, an older child whose abandoned toys occupy a backyard shed like relics from an earlier age of play. This could easily have been a digression, but it becomes one of the movie’s most important thematic mirrors. Blaze is nine-and-a-half, tech-savvy, socially more developed than Bonnie, and yet still capable of strange, elaborate, imaginative play.

Planned obsolescence.

What’s even more interesting is that the movie doesn’t portray her as a child untouched by technology. She’s certainly not some pastoral fantasy of pre-digital innocence. No, she represents a far more useful piece of evidence that “play” doesn’t have to vanish. It can become private, intermittent, transformed.

Alongside the shed toys are Blaze’s older tech toys: Smarty Pants, Snappy, and Atlas. These characters are crucial because they complicate the film’s apparent opposition between toys and devices. Smarty Pants is a toilet-training tech toy. Snappy is a toy camera. Atlas is a talking GPS hippo. They’re technological objects, yes, but they’re also toys. Which means they, too, have been forgotten. They, too, want purpose. They’re clearly not the sleek, social, always-on portals like Lilypad.

So the film’s answer to screen time avoids the puritanical, unrealistic retreat. It doesn’t preach to its audience that they should just throw away the tablet and return to wooden blocks. Toy Story 5 simply asks you to remember that the point of childhood connection is shared imaginative meaning. In whatever form that might take.

Woody’s return is probably the weakest creative decision here. It mainly reeks of studio notes that come down to “we can’t do a Toy Story movie without Woody doing something at some point.” Thankfully, Pixar doesn’t make him the center. He enters from his post-Toy Story 4 life with Bo Peep and the toy-rescue squad, which means his previous ending is still intact.

Here, his role is advisory and supportive, if not slightly awkward. He knows what it means to belong to a kid, and he knows what it means to live beyond that belonging. That makes him useful to Jessie, but not a replacement for her as protagonist.

A sly bit of franchise self-awareness.

Buzz, meanwhile, has been repositioned as Jessie’s deputy and would-be fiancé, which is both comic and quietly touching. The film gets a surprising amount of mileage out of Buzz wanting to be useful, wanting to be seen as Jessie’s partner in multiple versions of the word. He also feels the destabilizing effect of Woody’s return.

The 50 Hi-Tech Edition Buzz Lightyears add another layer of inspired lunacy, as we witness a whole army of Buzzes stuck in the original Buzz’s delusion, all Star Command rhetoric and heroic nonsense. It’s a gag, but it’s also a sly bit of franchise self-awareness. Here is a fifth Toy Story movie containing 50 shiny Buzz variants who do not know they are products. That is either accidental genius or very deliberate mischief.

The film is also, crucially very funny. And that matters. One of the reasons Toy Story 2 remains the high-water mark for many viewers is that it balances emotional devastation with true screwball energy. So it’s no wonder Pixar chose Finding Nemo‘s Andrew Stanton to lead the charge on a new Toy Story story that is both poignant and constantly entertaining.

See, Toy Story 5 understands that the existential dread of toys only works when surrounded by comic chaos. Forky and Karen Beverly’s wedding. Smarty Pants’ potty-training vulgarity. The absurdity of Buzz diplomacy. The shed toys’ devotional teatime. Bullseye encountering a real horse. It’s a sugar rush of surprising comedy that allows the film to smuggle in the ache.

A riotously funny adventure.

In this sense, Toy Story 5 is spiritually closer to Toy Story 2 than to Toy Story 4. Toy Story 4 is an epilogue about Woody’s selfhood after Andy and Bonnie. It is reflective, wandering, and somewhat untethered from the child’s room as the franchise’s emotional center. Toy Story 5, by contrast, returns to the question of what it means for a toy to be loved by a child whose life is changing. Like Toy Story 2, it’s about abandonment, memory, obsolescence, and the terror that love has an expiration date. Also like Toy Story 2, it appears to remember that this material plays best when the film is also a riotously funny adventure.

The visual strategy reinforces the argument. We see Bonnie’s imagination through handmade, pastel, chalk-like playtime sequences, giving her inner world a tactile, crafted quality. It’s fascinating to see from Pixar, the studio whose original breakthrough was computer-generated plastic. Thirty years later, they’re using the computer to simulate the handmade, the imperfect, the childlike, the chalky smudge of imagination. The form itself becomes an argument. That technology can recreate texture, but only imagination gives it meaning.

Randy Newman’s return matters for the same reason. Newman’s music has always been the emotional grammar of this franchise. His simple melodies have always carried complicated feelings about loyalty, time, friendship, and loss. The addition of Taylor Swift’s Jessie-centered song, “I Knew It, I Knew You,” positions the film explicitly in conversation with Jessie’s musical history. If “When She Loved Me” was the song of abandonment remembered (and now re-rendered as part of the score in this spiritual sequel to her first appearance), then this new song seems to function as a song of recognition restored. Not “you never left,” but “I knew you even after time changed us.”

Can imagination survive embarrassment?

The film’s weaknesses are easy enough to see. The film is quite crowded. There are a lot of pieces in motion with Lilypad, Bonnie’s social anxiety, Jessie’s crisis, Woody’s return, Buzz’s unrequited love for Jessie, the 50 Buzzes, Blaze, the shed toys, old tech toys, the Emily connection, Bonnie’s father’s inability to parent. That is a lot of plates to keep spinning, even for Pixar. The tech satire is also a bit too broad in places, particularly when characters repeatedly declare that the Age of Toys is over. Subtle it is not. And the Emily reveal asks the viewer to accept a fairly enormous coincidence in exchange for emotional catharsis.

But the reason the film seems to work anyway is that its central insight is strong enough to hold the machinery together. The film isn’t really asking whether toys can beat screens. That would be tedious. It’s asking whether imagination can survive embarrassment. Whether a child can find friends without sanding off the weird, playful parts of herself. And whether old forms of love can make room for new forms of connection.

And in Jessie, the film finds the perfect character to carry that question. Her fear was never abstract. She knows what it feels like to be left behind. Twice. She knows the heartbreak of a child moving on. Twice. So when Bonnie hesitates, hides, rejects, and returns, Jessie experiences all of it with the force of history repeating. But she finally learns for good that change has never been the same as failure.

The bottom line.

That, ultimately, is what gives Toy Story 5 its reason to exist. The franchise has always been about the secret life of toys, but the secret life of toys has always been a way of talking about the visible life of children. In Toy Story 5, childhood has changed. The room has changed. Friendship has changed. Play has become something a child may have to defend, even to herself. The film sees that shift and finds an emotional story lurking inside it.

Not screens bad. Not toys good. Something sadder, funnier, and more truthful. That a kid wants to belong, and the thing that makes her herself might also be the thing she is afraid to show. That is a proper Toy Story problem. And Jessie, bless her stitched little cowgirl heart, is exactly the toy to solve it.

Toy Story 5 opens in theaters on June 19. Watch the trailer here.

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Images courtesy of Disney and Pixar.