Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
Toy Story 5 begins with a delightfully silly action sequence: A shipping container full of Buzz Lightyear figures washes up on the beach of a tiny atoll. Emerging from their factory-sealed boxes like so many sea turtles hatching from eggs, these puzzled astronauts are in essence newborn orphans, with no elders to school them in plaything culture or language. They can communicate only by using the handful of prerecorded phrases they all share, and though they are united in their tireless commitment to their mission, they lack the knowledge or experience to have any idea what that mission might be.
The Buzzes’ noble yet clueless search for their lives’ true purpose—to find children whose loved toys they can become—is a subplot that intersects with the main story only late in the film. But the profound questions posed by these gag-filled, mostly wordless scenes echo throughout Toy Story 5. If the meaning of a toy’s life is to belong to a child, and to share the joy of creative play with that child and with one’s fellow toys, then what about the rest of us, the ones not made of stuffed fabric or cast resin? Do we have a mission on Earth beyond what came with our factory programming, and if so, how do we map our way to that unknown star?
Part of the magic of the Toy Story series is the playful seriousness, or serious playfulness, with which the movies have explored the concept of play itself. Each installment has found a new perspective on the relationship between a child’s imagination and the physical objects that are that child’s toys, whether they’re branded action figures like the stranded Buzzes or just a spork with glued-on googly eyes. (Reviews of Toy Story 4 were, by the high standards of this franchise, somewhat divided, and while I’ll concede it’s the weakest in a stellar lineup and didn’t strictly need to exist, I was and remain a staunch supporter of Team Forky.) Over the course of 31 years, we’ve seen a vast range of experience from the toys’ point of view: What is it like to be lost? Stolen? Displayed on a shelf? Demoted in the hierarchy of playtime favorites? Outgrown? Donated? Found once more? Passed on to a new generation of children?
With this fifth installment, Andrew Stanton, who has co-written all the movies to date (this time with Kenna Harris) and directed such Pixar classics as Finding Nemo and Wall-E, helms a Toy Story for the first time. The premise recalls that of the original movie, updated for the age of digital media: Once more a child’s high-tech new toy threatens to eclipse its older, analog counterparts. In 1995 the cutting-edge novelty was represented by Buzz Lightyear himself, with his electronic features and flashing lights. But Buzz (voiced as always by Tim Allen) seems as old-fashioned as a rag doll next to Lily the Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee), the frog-shaped interactive tablet who upends the toys’ lives when their owner, 8-year-old Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), gets her as a present.
After Lily’s arrival, the toys find themselves forgotten in dusty corners as their owner becomes entirely absorbed by this transfixing new device. Bonnie is a shy girl who has trouble making friends, and at first it seems as if the ability to connect to other kids online will serve as a shortcut to meeting them in real life. But a group chat she joins with three girls from her dance class—all addicted to their own Lilypads—leaves Bonnie humiliated after they mock her for still playing with toys.
At the end of Toy Story 4, the gang’s longtime ringleader Woody (Tom Hanks) departed for a life as a freelance toy, helping lost or abandoned playthings find new children to belong to. Now Woody’s onetime deputy, cowgirl doll Jessie (Joan Cusack), wears the sheriff’s star; as Bonnie’s former favorite, she is especially annoyed by the perky digital rival who has replaced her in the little girl’s affections. After a series of misunderstandings, Jessie and her trusty cloth steed Bullseye wind up stranded in the bedroom of another girl, Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris), who lives on a farm outside town. The toys call in Woody to help devise a plan to rescue the lost dolls and, if possible, save Bonnie’s brain from the all-too-familiar fate of being overly online.
Dana Stevens
The Best Part of Toy Story 4 Is the Existential Terror
Read More
What’s most heartening, and most surprising, is how consistently this latest installment in a venerable franchise makes an argument not just for its existence (Quentin Tarantino’s preferences notwithstanding) but for its necessity. Childhood really has undergone a sea change with the 21st-century advent of digital technology, the internet, and now artificial intelligence; you only have to see a baby in a stroller being placated by their parent’s phone to worry, as Bonnie’s toys do, about what such early exposure to an infinite stream of ready-made entertainment is doing to the attention spans and social skills of kids. Yet for all its concern with the impact of limitless screen time, Toy Story 5 is no Luddite screed; Lily may start out as Jessie’s playtime nemesis, but she is never the movie’s true villain. Rather, not unlike the freshly unboxed Buzzes, she is a well-intended toy who lacks the experience and context to see what her true purpose is.
Toy Story 5’s critique of tech is also undercut by the introduction of three new characters who come from an earlier generation of handheld gadgets for kids: Atlas (Craig Robinson), a hippo-shaped toy equipped with GPS; Snappy (Shelby Rabara), a pre-smartphone-era digital camera; and most memorably, a toilet-training aid named Smarty Pants (Conan O’Brien), who, when not defaulting to infantile-yet-funny bathroom humor, takes personal offense at Jessie’s technophobic rants. This likable threesome, all of whom have been stashed in a drawer for years, waiting for replacement batteries, winds up joining forces with Jessie to reunite her with her toy community.
To say more about the intricate chases and rescues that make up the action-packed plot of Toy Story 5 would be to deprive the viewer of countless moments of discovery and surprise. The sight gags and throwaway punch lines are so thick on the ground it’s hard to stop laughing at one joke in time to pay attention to the next. Even characters we encounter only in a scene or two—a doomsaying garden gnome, Keanu Reeves’ returning motorcycle stuntman Duke Caboom, or Bad Bunny’s single-line turn as the aptly named Pizza With Sunglasses—are distinctive enough that when they return as 2D drawings in the closing credits, there’s a happy sense of recognition. The plethora of new characters means that we don’t get as much time as we might like with old favorites such as John Ratzenberger’s sardonic piggy bank Hamm, Wallace Shawn’s timorous dinosaur Rex, or for that matter Forky, that flailing piece of flatware voiced by Tony Hale, but as the movie resolutely argues, change isn’t always a bad thing.
-
Toy Story 5 Takes On a Dark Subject—and Comes Away the Best Pixar Sequel in Years
-
It’s the Most Controversial Scene in One of the 2000s’ Most Polarizing Movies. Even the Screenwriter Was Baffled. What if We Got It Wrong?
-
Spielberg Never Told Her That Her Scene Would Be the Movie’s Climax. Now She’s Going Viral for Her Performance.
Above all, watching the tightly plotted, satisfyingly joke-dense, and startlingly thoughtful Toy Story 5, I felt grateful for a franchise sequel that doesn’t settle for relying on the affection built up for its characters over the past 31 years. There’s a tremendous generosity toward the viewer in the attention the film pays to witty visual details, snappy dialogue, and top-notch voice acting (especially, this time around, from Cusack, whose Jessie can go from outrage to vulnerability to gritty determination within the space of a single scene).
Through all the humor and hijinks, that commitment to the value of playing I mentioned up top shines through, especially in the intermittent sequences animated in a rough 2D style, as if sketched with a child’s crayons. These scenes are meant to show us the way Bonnie’s play sessions feel inside her head, as the toys assume different personas according to their role in that day’s game. The joyous chaos of these animations is an illustration of the pleasure Bonnie and her toys take in these mutual pretending sessions: They transform into whatever she needs them to be in that moment, and she in turn gives their lives purpose by providing a space in which they can all create something new together. There are worse designs for living, even if you aren’t made of plastic, pixels, or plush.
