Toy Story 5 Chickens Out on Its Critique of Our Tech Addictions

The question of what counts as a toy in real life more or less comes down to what a kid might want to play with, but in Toy Story, the matter is existential. Toys have sentience as well as the ability to move around when humans aren’t looking. Over five installments now, Pixar’s flagship franchise has built out what amounts to a theology etched in plastic and rubber about what constitutes a toy. Because, despite the company’s anthropomorphized desk-lamp logo, these movies aren’t doling out self-awareness to stuff all willy-nilly. Obviously, your standards like rag-doll Woody (Tom Hanks) and action-figure Buzz (Tim Allen) and trademarked classics like the Potato Heads and Slinky Dog can come to life. But so can characters pushing the knickknack/plaything boundary, like porcelain figurines and piggy banks. (It helps to have a face.)

Being assembled and claimed by kindergartner Bonnie transforms an initially reluctant Forky from trash to toy in Toy Story 4, but becoming discarded and ownerless doesn’t rob lost toys of their selfhood. What seems to matter most is the potential for these items to be receptacles for a child’s imagination and love, something they remain animated by even as those children grow up and move on. All of which makes Toy Story 5’s proposition that high-tech new additions, like proto-tablet antagonist Lilypad (Greta Lee), can also talk, think, and move around on their own downright maddening. It’s one thing to get verklempt over the way that cowgirl doll Jessie (Joan Cusack) keeps getting left behind by the kids she loves. It’s another to be assured that a bunch of e-waste, even voiced by the likes of Conan O’Brien, Craig Robinson, and Shelby Rabara, can care just as deeply about the child they were discarded by after a few months, and that they also possess something approximating a soul.

Pixar is based right across the bay from San Francisco and was born out of the promise that computer animation can be just as emotionally rich and as creatively ambitious as the hand-drawn stuff. Fair to say it was always going to be conflicted over whether devices (a word Jessie spits like a slur) are harming us. Back in the animation pioneer’s heyday, it offered up a futuristic portrait of humanity reduced to boneless adult babies sucking on straws while watching screens in WALL-E. But it also counterbalanced that image with a romance between two robots who were as expressive and enchanting as the Old Hollywood stars they watched on a battered VHS. The way that Toy Story 5 presents our impending dystopia of compulsive screen time, with Jessie glumly surveying a suburban landscape of windows aglow with phones and computers that everyone’s silently staring at, doesn’t feel like the work of a company wrestling with its own relationship with technology and how it’s changing the world.

No, it just feels like Pixar is dutifully plugging the latest think-piece cycle into its output, as Hoppers did with our collective sense of powerlessness, and as Inside Out 2 did with anxiety. Toy Story 5, which was directed by studio stalwart Andrew Stanton (who co-wrote the script with Kenna Harris), is both the best thing Pixar has done since Turning Red and disappointing in a way that only something you once found utterly captivating could manage to be. It achieves one terrifically tear-jerking sequence that’s right up there with the greatest moments of sublime devastation in Pixar movies over the years, from the opening of Up to the “When She Loved Me” interlude in Toy Story 2. And it brings back so many beloved characters: Hamm (John Ratzenberger) and Rex (Wallace Shawn) and Bo Peep (Annie Potts) and newer additions like the aforementioned Forky (Tony Hale) and Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves). And of course the now-free-range Woody and the still-devoted Buzz, bickering their way through their attempts to track down Jessie when she goes missing after maneuvering her way into a sleepover.

It’s nice to spend more time in the company of these characters, who have a delightful physicality and real personality that comes through even in tiny doses. But Toy Story 5 scrabbles to justify why they’re all still around — Woody, in particular, could be excised from the story without any loss — and why this franchise is as well. These characters have been grappling with fears of obsolescence since 1995. That’s why, when the now-8-year-old Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) starts spending hours staring at the brand-new Lilypad with a sandpaper-eyed blankness that’s terribly familiar, it doesn’t come across as a genuine threat to the very idea of playtime, despite the dire warnings that Jessie is given by discarded playthings that “the age of toys is over!” It’s just the latest thing that the toys must overcome before reaffirming their value to kids who actually appreciate them, like Bonnie and like Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris), the quirky horse girl that Jessie hopes will befriend her owner.

It’s not exactly a heartening message, that the world is destined to surrender to passively being addicted to devices with the exception of the special children, who’ll actually want to play outside and make up stories starring their toys on their own. But it’s comforting to parents, who in Toy Story 5 are freed from having to make tougher decisions about screen time and keeping their kids offline at the possible expense of social interactions with classmates (when Bonnie is bullied in a group chat, her parents disable that function but don’t take Lilypad away). Toy Story 5 can’t go too hard on the tech itself, not when Disney and Pixar are collaborating on an actual Lilypad by LeapFrog. But the movie also doesn’t actually want to delve into the complications of a digitally connected existence. Aside from a delightful parallel story line about a cargo container of Buzz Lightyear toys that gets lost, leading to a platoon of identical figurines trekking their way through the wilderness to inevitably intersect with the main plot, Toy Story 5 is content to run through beats that have become very familiar. The franchise has started to feel like the toys it continues to showcase — something that should be battered beyond recognition and retired to a donation box by now, but that no one can bear to let go.

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