When Things Go Pop

It was only a matter of time before technology came for Toy Story.

Since 1995, Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and the rest of the toybox gang have reflected the special relationship people have with childhood toys. That relationship has changed, if not been completely supplanted, by smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and other smart devices. As childhood imagination has largely shifted to second- and third-screen devices, those former conduits are on the proverbial chopping block. You can’t blame the dolls and action figures for freaking out a little bit.

Toy Story 5 explores this existential crisis through Jessie (Joan Cusack), the franchise’s new lead toy after Woody (Tom Hanks) joined Bo and the lost toys in Toy Story 4. The toys’ owner, Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), loves them, but her parents fear that they are a crutch for their painfully shy daughter. They decide to solve the issue by buying Bonnie a Lilypad tablet (or Lily, voiced by Greta Lee), which is packed with mini-games and an Internet connection to other kids. Bonnie quickly latches onto Lily, losing herself in games and direct messages with her classmates while leaving the toys to fend for themselves. Jessie believes she knows better and sets out to break Bonnie from her digital prison before it’s too late.

Truthfully, that summary is less nuanced than Toy Story 5’s storytelling. For all our anxieties about technology consuming our lives, centering on them probably doesn’t make for a compelling story. Lily is the ostensible villain, but filmmaker Andrew Stanton doesn’t make her irredeemable or the source of all the toys’ ills. Instead, he grounds Jessie’s distrust of Lily and technology overall in the deeply relatable fear of being left behind by a loved one. Like her first owner, Emily, and Andy, Jessie worries that her kids never truly cared about her, and the prospect of losing another one is intolerable. Grounding obsolescence in the fear of being forgotten and unloved is quite devastating when Stanton pulls the trigger in the third act.

Stanton also doesn’t ignore how the internet and social networking can forge genuine relationships in ways that were inconceivable in the first two Toy Story films. He explores that through Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris), a child who ends up with Jessie and Bullseye when they get lost before Bonnie’s Lily-sanctioned sleepover. Through Blaze, Jessie sees that Blaze would be a perfect friend for Bonnie and realizes that technology, specifically the film’s version of Facebook, is the only way to unite them. That connection is hindered by Bonnie feeling peer-pressured by her online friends to abandon her toys and other childlike passions. The film ultimately lands on a surprisingly generous reading of technology’s impact on children: that it has merits but requires consideration, care, and the right emotional tools to help kids cope with the inevitably toxic interactions it can breed.

Toy Story 5’s reckoning with the existential crisis caused by smart devices doesn’t mean it’s without whimsy. The film is jam-packed with heart and charm, both narratively and visually. One of the film’s best motifs is the shift from Pixar’s iconic 3D animation to a pseudo-2D art style whenever Bonnie and Blaze use their imaginations. As a lapsed Toy Story watcher, those sequences were a delightful surprise, yielding some of the film’s strongest comedic moments and underscoring the importance of imagination.

I was also surprised by how easily I could jump back into the toys’ world after more than a decade away. People who watched Toy Story 4 probably won’t have the same deeply emotional reaction to Woody and Buzz’s reunion at Bonnie’s house that I had, but it points to the franchise’s durability that it could evoke that reaction at all.

As glorious and tear-jerking as the nostalgic and novel storytelling engines are, there are some things in Toy Story 5 that strain credulity. While a hilarious sight gag in its own right, the new-model Buzz Lightyear army often feels like a diversion and is largely unrelated to the main story. It does tie into it nicely at the end, even if it’s a bit too convenient.

A slightly more confusing issue is the existence of Blaze’s forgotten tech toys. The toys look like relics of the late 90s and the early 2000s, with their pixelated screens and their double AA batteries. But they are later revealed to be connected to Wi-Fi and social media, which creates a visual cognitive dissonance. It feels like a storytelling choice made for narrative convenience above all else. It doesn’t diminish the story’s emotional impact, but it does warrant a quirked eyebrow.

I imagine that minor quibble might garner “who cares, it’s a kids’ movie” responses from Disney fans. I would agree, but from a different angle. Toy Story 5 is the best possible example of a kids’ movie, one that caters to their interests without sacrificing its emotional resonance and intelligence. We can debate whether it should’ve continued up to this point (and beyond), but Toy Story proves that it’s flexible enough to mold to the current moment without being easily written off as a cash grab.

To paraphrase another character under the Disney tent, they’ll be making Toy Stories until we’re 90, and they’ll still be worth seeing, even in our wheelchairs.