Toy Story 5 is a warm and wry update of a beloved formula
Pixar’s unmistakably anxious sequel asks what becomes of toys in the age of screens
Pixar’s signature franchise was built on a premise that once felt indestructible: toys live, kids love them and both eventually have to grow up. But how do you make a Toy Story film for a young audience whose most treasured possessions are no longer dolls and figurines but tablets and phones? The warm and wry but also unmistakably anxious Toy Story 5 is the studio’s answer, and it’s a rather good one.
In the grand old Toy Story tradition, it is another parable of parental crisis dressed up as a brightly coloured family adventure, as the arrival of a notionally child-friendly, yet conniving and manipulative, smart device: the green, goggle-eyed Lilypad (any similarities to the real-world LeapFrog tablet are presumably just on the safe side of actionable) forces Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack) and the others to reckon with their own obsolescence. It is directed and co-written by a Pixar veteran, Andrew Stanton of Finding Nemo and Wall.E, and features another score by series stalwart Randy Newman, though he stops short of breaking into a mordant chorus of “You’ve Got a Friend Request in Me”.
While it feels like an even more optional coda to the perfect original trilogy than 2019’s Toy Story 4, it is also timely – as a cautionary tale about online childhoods, it arrives at a highly convenient moment for Sir Keir Starmer – and pulls fewer punches than might be expected.
Lily, voiced by Greta Lee, is a classic Silicon Valley disruptor. Within seconds of booting up, she has eight-year-old Bonnie rapt in her screen’s dim blue glow, while her father – similarly glued to his smartphone; parents aren’t let off the hook – absent-mindedly stows her old toys in the garage. Some narrative swerves then elevate cowgirl Jessie to the main heroic role (she and her saggy steed Bullseye end up miles away on a rescue mission gone wrong), while Woody and Buzz are left in charge of the B-plot, trying to break Lily’s spell at home.
Along with a couple of flashes of the hybrid hand-painted-yet-somehow-still-3D animation style pioneered by DreamWorks in The Wild Robot (2024), Jessie’s promotion to lead is one of surprisingly few concessions to modernity in a film that feels more like the work of Pixar’s old guard than anything the studio has made this decade. While Toy Story 5 may fall short of essential, in an age in which children’s entertainment routinely panders to its audience, there is something quietly radical about a film that is willing to worry for them.
In cinemas from June 19
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
