‘Toy Story 5’ Tackles Technology

A tech animation company is making a movie about the dangers of tech. Tread lightly, Pixar!

And so it does. Toy Story 5 tiptoes quietly away from any real confrontation while toothlessly gnawing on screen-time anxiety and cyberbullying. It name-checks the perils of a digital childhood without condemning it outright, and sidesteps any real conversation about its pitfalls by simply promoting the good clean mental-health alternative of irl playtime with analog toys. Do not bite the Mouse-House hand that feeds: Disney has its own branded devices, content, streaming services and digital ecosystem. They definitely do not want to trip up their profit-driven motives just because some do-gooder message movie is promoting hours of imaginative fun that’s not monetized, itemized, and algorithmically optimized for data-mining.

Toy Story 5 ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Andrew Stanton
Written by: Andrew Stanton, Kenna Harris
Starring: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Greta Lee, Conan O’Brien, Craig Robinson, Shelby Rabara, Scarlett Spears
Running time: 102 mins

But that doesn’t mean Toy Story 5 can’t indulge in having its illustrious lineup of anthropomorphized dolls, action figures, stuffies, pipe-cleaner doohickies and whatnots spiral into their patented panic-mode whenever change arises. You’d think, after four films where they witness kid owners who invariably grow up and leave them, where they experience being donated both accidentally and intentionally, and where they even come face-to-face with incinerator annihilation, these toys would be a bit more zen about impermanence.

“The age of toys is over, lass!” hisses a discarded salty sea captain buried in the backyard up to his neck. Another thrown-away toy chimes in with its own hysteria: “Devices! Everywhere! All the tapping! Tap! Tap! Tap!” This otherwise mildly zany and sweetly sentimental movie is actually at its best when its characters freak out over all the new tech, even showing a panoramic shot of the neighborhood at night with eerie glowing devices in front of everyone’s frozen faces. The horror! The horror!

Poor little Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), now 8 years old and just as painfully shy as ever, feels like a misfit when the grade-school twins next door watch her playing in the yard with go-to favorite doll Jessie (Joan Cusack) and laugh off her half-hearted invite to join. “Why won’t anyone be my friend?” she asks her parents — six words that would destroy any loving mom and dad.

So her parents take the most logical step for any 21^st century adult taking care of any minor: they get her an iPad. In this case, it’s a LilyPad (Greta Lee), a touch screen encased in a green plastic slipcover made to look like a frog. Honestly, it’s impressive that the couple held out so long before buying one, raising a child without the world’s most popular electronic babysitter. And once Bonnie gets one in her clutches, she becomes zombiefied.

The toys are definitely not happy about it — especially Jessie, the de facto leader of the group ever since Woody (Tom Hanks) ran off with Bo Peep (Annie Potts). She even hops on an old walkie-talkie to summon Woody and Bo Peep from their new pastime: collecting old discarded toys out of people’s backyards. Woody is now way past his prime, suffering the indignity of being called “some sort of old man toy” and even sporting a patch of worn-down brown on his cranium that perfectly resembles a bald spot.

LilyPad seems pretty great at first, despite the analog toys’ knee-jerk ire, and finds a quick solution to Bonnie’s loner problem by adding her to a local group chat so she can connect with three nearby kids. She even gets invited to a sleepover, where everyone naturally sits around silently staring at their screens.

Poor Bonnie still loves her toys, even though she neglects them. Making things worse, Jessie — trying to stay close to Bonnie — gets thrown out of a car and relocated to the rural address that her original owner wrote on her cowgirl chaps. So now she’s got to find her way back, with the help of some ironically discarded out-of-date tyke tech like a potty-training device called Smarty Pants (Conan O’Brien), a primitive GPS device called Atlas (Craig Robinson), and a low-pixel toy camera called Snappy (Shelby Rabara).

Once Bonnie’s friend group gets a whiff of her love for Jessie, they bombard her with cruel, mocking texts. Even worse, a scheming LilyPad sends Bonnie’s dad a text pretending to be Bonnie and asking that all her toys be boxed up and put in the garage. So now she has no friend and no toys. And it’s up to Jessie and her crew to save the day.

I forgot to mention that Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) is in this movie, too. Lots of them, actually, since the film opens with a cargo container of fifty Buzz Lightyears (souped up with the latest new-tech wizardry) scattered on a remote desert island. They all band together and eventually make a raft that somehow brings them to the very same area where Bonnie lives, where they get into forest shenanigans and randomly end up stumbling upon Jessie. Meanwhile, the O.G. Buzz has developed a crush on Jessie and spends most of his time tongue-tied over how to propose.

Oh, is this movie supposed to be about the emotionally crippling dangers of technology? Right, I forgot, and so did the filmmakers. There’s also a girl named Blaze who lives in Jessie’s original owner’s old house, who at 9 ½ is slightly older than Bonnie and has a horse. She doesn’t use her digital tablet very much — just long enough to get a text message from a friend who decided to cancel a playdate with her at the last minute. So I guess that counts as an incisive critique of kid tech.

This being a Pixar movie in 2026, Toy Story 5 boasts bedazzled animation so brilliantly impressive that the earlier Toy Story films (especially the original) now look progressively more primitive in comparison. The joke quotient here is respectably high, and even the bit characters are engagingly charming, although Smarty Pants does seem to revel in a lot of scatological humor. It’s his “doody” to point out any excrement-related puns, like when they drive by a filling station and he jokes that they just “passed gas.” Funny crap, right? Riiight?

Audiences hoping that the delightful but naggingly shallow Toy Story 5 might stop throwing its punches and actually focus its storytelling on the complexities and conflicted emotions people feel about technology — not only in children’s lives, but in all corners of daily existence — will be sorely disappointed. “Toys are for play, but tech is for everything,” says one character ominously. Excellent point, please elaborate on the one single permeating topic that is transforming every single person’s modern life whether we want it to or not. No? Too hard? You’d rather just distract viewers with another poop joke? Well, shit.