Jessie leads a timely Pixar adventure about screens, play and growing up too fast.
Nobody comes to a Toy Story movie expecting to think about screen addiction and the accelerated loss of childhood. Toy Story 5 makes that its entire point. Thirty one years after Toy Story helped launch Pixar, the beloved cast of sentient toys has returned for a fifth chapter that is more timely than anyone expected and more thoughtful than it needed to be.
Pixar returns to what works after years away
After Lightyear (2022) stumbled badly enough to raise real questions about where the franchise was headed, Toy Story 5 avoids two obvious traps. It does not chase nostalgia at the expense of story, and it does not try to revive the full original ensemble just to fill seats. Fan favorites including Rex, Slinky Dog and Mr. Potato Head, along with Toy Story 4‘s breakout creation Forky, are reduced to brief appearances. Woody and Buzz Lightyear, voiced by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, take supporting roles in a story that belongs almost entirely to Jessie, voiced by Joan Cusack. Narrowing the focus onto one character gives Toy Story 5 a clarity of purpose that some later entries lacked.
A world where kids have stopped playing
The film’s central concern is what screen addiction does to childhood. Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the current owner of the toys, finds herself increasingly isolated as the children around her abandon imaginative play for tablets and group chats. The main antagonist is a tablet called LilyPad. A newly introduced character named Smarty Pants, a potty training device, supplies most of the sharper and occasionally edgier humor.
A parallel subplot involving an army of Buzz Lightyear versions functions as the story’s purest comic relief, recalling the manic energy of Scrat from the Ice Age series. Equally inventive are several sequences rendered in a storybook visual style as the children’s play comes to life on screen. These are the film’s finest moments and the clearest expression of what director Andrew Stanton most wants to celebrate.
Where Pixar earns its reputation
The animation is exceptional, and the emotional core holds firm even when the script strains under the weight of its message. A late sequence in which Jessie discovers that her original child’s formative years spent playing with toys shaped her well into adulthood, including naming her own daughter after the toy, is among the most affecting moments in the entire franchise.
LilyPad is eventually redeemed rather than destroyed, and the film’s resolution attempts to find space for imaginative play and modern technology to coexist. The ending feels like a compromise, but an honest one. The overall tone is darker than most entries in the series, though it never crosses into anything more intense than Sid’s room delivered in the original 1995 film.
A film aimed slightly past its youngest viewers
Toy Story 5 is wholesome overall, but it carries more winking adult humor than previous entries, most of it tied to the Smarty Pants character. The content is mild, though parents should be aware of some wordplay that leans crude. More broadly, the film seems to address the adults in the audience at least as much as it does the children. Stanton has said the story asks what technology means to parents and to their kids, and the order of that phrasing is telling.
A subplot in which peers absorbed in technology mock Bonnie for still playing with toys is handled with good intentions but may inadvertently tell younger viewers that imaginative play is something to feel embarrassed about. It is the opposite of what the film intends, and it resolves the idea well enough. Even so, it lingers. Toy Story 5 is a worthy entry in a franchise that still has things to say. Whether those things land most with the children watching or the parents sitting next to them may be its one unresolved question.