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Toy Story 5 (2026)

As of writing, Andrew Stanton’s Toy Story 5 has grossed over $1 billion at the global box office. And yet, Pixar Animation Studios suffered the worst of the July 2026 layoffs at the Walt Disney Company. This came in addition to a twenty percent staff reduction in January 2024. The turbulence comes as Disney looks to emerge as a victor in the “Streaming Wars” and pay off its multibillion dollar debts after its 2019 acquisition of 21st Century Fox. Coincidentally or not, 2019 – the year of Toy Story 4’s release – marked the year of Pixar’s storytelling decline and a realization of the studio’s increasing reliance on sequels. This is not to say that Pixar is a terminally ill studio no longer capable of making worthy art. Instead, its impossibly lofty standards of its first decade-and-a-half are no longer.

There is a worthy story to tell in Toy Story 5, however much audiences believe the series should have ended on the third installment (2010) – a position this writer seconds, even after viewing this latest entry. So, to the best of my ability, I will attempt to separate the public’s (and my) grouchiness over the existence of the fourth and fifth films from whether or not Toy Story 5 succeeds on its own merits.

In sum, Stanton (2003’s Finding Nemo, 2008’s WALL-E) and co-writer Kenna Harris’ (a long-time story artist who has no feature screenwriting experience) script is overstuffed with too much plot and not enough reflection. And that is such a shame, given that this, for the first time in a Toy Story film, provides Jessie with the greatest character development and screentime of any of the toys. And more than any of the four Toy Story movies before it, the emotional center of this entry is a human, not a toy. Bonnie, old enough now to fully comprehend embarrassment and on the cusp of being able to verbalize the emotional impact of loneliness and social isolation, feels both in spades. Whether or not children are in your life, those are difficult emotions to address, let alone understand.

Whenever Toy Story 5 keeps Jessie’s and her fellow toys’ feelings of obsolescence (some things stay the same, thirty years later) and Bonnie’s growing pains at the forefront, it is Pixar filmmaking landing the emotional punches. Whenever Toy Story 5 delves into its excessive pursuit scenes, its new Buzz Lightyear model subplot, and the story splintering that requires the main characters to find a way to reunite (a leftover issue from 2019’s Toy Story 4), it goes astray.

Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) is now eight years old, and her parents decide to purchase a frog-themed tablet named Lilypad (nicknamed “Lily”, voiced by Greta Lee and whose character design and interface are excellent pieces of animation), if only to have her fit in better with children her age. The cross-street neighbors and her classmates seem not to play with toys, and Bonnie’s rambunctious style of play – filled with personal references, as well as characterizations and scenarios that Bonnie invented herself – seems off-putting to other children. In the first hours and days with Lily, Bonnie quickly connects with a few classmates her age, via the tablet’s internal gaming and social media apps.

Curiously, Bonnie’s parents overlook the parental controls on Lily – and their daughter quickly becomes addicted to her new device to play with her new friends. To the consternation of Jessie (Joan Cusack), who is now in charge following Woody’s departure at the end of Toy Story 4, and her fellow toys, this means that Bonnie is no longer playing with them. The quality of Bonnie’s interactions with other people is increasingly coming through a screen – including one damaging moment of cyberbullying. Remembrances of Emily (Jessie’s previous child, as seen in flashback in 1999’s Toy Story 2) haunt Jessie still, as she looks to address – whether through reason or coercion – Lily’s growing influence over Bonnie’s life.

Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Blake Clark, and more reprise their roles as Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Rex, Hamm, and Slinky. Jeff Bergman and Anna Vocino, respectively, replace the late Don Rickles and Estelle Harris as Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. Among notable additions: Conan O’Brien is Smarty Pants, a potty training toy; Shelby Rabara is Snappy, a toy camera; Craig Robinson is Atlas, a GPS toy; and Mykal-Michelle Harris is Blaze, a slightly older girl Bonnie will meet on accident.

Technology has not been on Pixar’s mind to this extent since WALL-E. But that film was science fiction. The fiction is no longer – computers and mobile devices are now a constant in modern children’s lives. Lily – and the apps found on her – represent a parental nightmare scenario (if the parents are paying attention in the first place). An unregulated chat function, addicting and non-educational games, and an unchecked ability to make “friends” is thrilling to Bonnie. But through how her new online friends are presenting themselves and speaking to her, Bonnie begins to spend more of her time trying to “be cool” – they do not play with toys anymore, so why should she? Lily (which the film implies almost every child in the neighborhood has) and technology like her is for cooler, maturer kids. Jessie, Buzz (who was a top-of-the-line piece of tech when the first Toy Story movie came out), and the gang are antiques by comparison.

Bonnie finds connection instantaneously. But what is the quality of said connection? She converses with her online friends through a chat that appears to be without pre-selected phrases and allows free-typing. Their interactions are specious, meme-filled, and dopamine-geared. The film’s editing in those scenes reflect that, providing rapid cuts crossing forth between Lily’s screen and Bonnie’s face, but not so rapid that we cannot read or see what is happening on the device. Shortly after she receives Lily, Bonnie – clearly addicted – becomes more withdrawn at home. The emotional energy she is spending to present herself as a hip, socially acceptable on that device wears her down.

This culminates in a moment of cyberbullying. I imagine as you are reading this, “cyberbullying” may connote a swath of things – the worst of which has led victims of cyberbullying down horrible paths for their sense of self-worth. Let me assure you, the reader, that even though the cyberbullying in Toy Story 5 is a on the lighter side of things (Bonnie’s newfound friends make fun of her for playing with toys), Bonnie is still treated poorly over something that is an integral part of her that does not harm herself or others. Playing with her beloved toys serves as an outlet for her imagination, a way to process a confusing world, and a sense of personal constancy when things change. How does an eight-year-old fully articulate that to her friends when she has never done so to anyone else before? Toy Story 5 handles the moment intelligently and with the requisite emotion (which moved me to tears), but lets Bonnie’s parents a little off the hook due to their near-complete lack of oversight (mitigated by the fact that these movies have never truly adopted a parental point of view).

However, Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris’ screenplay is not one written by Luddites. This is not an anti-tech screed. Without going into too many details, Toy Story 5 argues that there are appropriate ways of using technology in children’s play – as an additive, and not the principal means of play. Whether you agree with that argument, which admittedly feels rushed alongside the various subplots, is up to each individual viewer. But it makes for a more interesting narrative than a depthless disparagement.

Those various subplots I referred to threaten to derail Toy Story 5 (and take the attention far away from Pixar’s continued push in photorealism outside of its character designs), however hilarious I still found each of them in the moment. The growing influx of toys that the Toy Story series has included since the first movie has become unwieldy. There is almost no space left for the supporting cast among Andy’s original toys – Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Hamm, Slinky, and Rex – nor Bonnie’s original toys introduced in Toy Story 3. This is a film for the headliners (Woody, Buzz, and Jessie) and our newest additions (Blaze’s Smarty Pants, Snappy, and Atlas).

Two subplots in particular are all too convenient for the sake of characterizations and the film’s dramatic climax. The dramatic climax ends in yet another high-speed Pixar pursuit – how many of these have there been now? – to rescue someone in order to achieve the goal. In terms of characterizations, Toy Story 5 has the most mentions of Emily, Jessie’s former kid, of any Toy Story media outside the second film. There is a particular reason for this that I would rather not spoil. That subplot resolves in a way that feels as if Stanton and Harris are too neatly attempting to close a narrative hole that never necessitated one. If anything, Jessie’s emotional closure here is too miraculous and expedient. We should consider ourselves lucky if a relationship that goes astray or one that ends in an untimely way (that is not death) concludes with a clear emotional resolution. I think it might be more realistic (and more interesting to talk to children about), given the time elapsed between Toy Story 2 and 5, that Jessie found closure without completeness.

Eighty-two year-old composer Randy Newman (all Toy Story films, 1984’s The Natural) comes off his longest gap between film assignments ever. His last film, Noam Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), infused Americana textures – light strings and woodwinds, a piano guiding much of the way – in lyrical ways, making sense of both main characters’ feelings amid a divorce. This is a sound that (minus the divorce, and with the strings doing the heaviest lifting) has also come to define Toy Story. A series predicated on nostalgia and obsolescence still retains a musical identity that, unlike in 1995, is now regrettably leaning towards the latter in Hollywood.

Newman’s score has plenty of original material, but its emotional centerpiece is “When She Loved Me” from Toy Story 2 – a song that has become Jessie’s leitmotif. Newman deploys it beautifully and strategically in Toy Story 5. “Tire Swing Hill” is the highlight, as “When She Loved Me” transitions into the melody from “I Will Go Sailing No More” (from the original film, seldom used as a Woody motif). Closer to the end, “Highway Robbery” is Newman at his action scoring best. There, he is propulsive without being repetitive, a failing of many modern composers. The cue brims with American Western-inflected progressions (perhaps an influence from uncle Alfred Newman) juxtaposed seamlessly with those one might expect from a 1990s/2000s action thriller. It is a marvel of orchestration and harmonic crisscrossing for the entire orchestra.

The most musically visible element of Toy Story 5 is Taylor Swift’s “I Knew It, I Knew You”, co-written with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. The song is pleasant, inoffensive, and lyrically interesting even if I dislike the modern pop music phrasing that has defined Taylor Swift’s career (as well as numerous other contemporaries’). However, it is the first Toy Story original song with zero bearing on the score. Due to its 2020s pop phrasing, how could it? 2020s pop music does not prioritize melodic lyricism, but rhythm and repetition. Newman never quotes it, and I sense Swift and Antonoff and Newman worked in isolation of each other. The song does little but attach to the film the most bankable musician in the world as of mid-2026.

For a time, it seemed that Toy Story might exist solely through television specials in a 2013 Halloween and 2014 Christmas special. But with the current situation at the Walt Disney Company – a new CEO in Josh D’Amaro who has only ever worked in the company’s products licensing and Disney Parks and experiences division, and never in filmmaking; a mountain of 21st Century Fox acquisition debt – it seems Pixar is taking a narratively conservative path. And that includes an increase in sequels to come (Incredibles 3 has a 2028 release date, with Coco 2 and a third Monsters, Inc. movie reportedly in the works). Even with Joan Cusack, Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, and others sounding noticeably older than before (to the point where Allen needed vocal training to restore his vocal vigor for Buzz), how much farther can Toy Story go?

Whatever that answer is, one senses that Toy Story 5 will not be the end of the series in movie theaters. It has made too much money for the modern Walt Disney Company to not return to this well. And though I have been clear about how unnecessary the fourth and fifth movies have been, Toy Story retains its emotional pull. This fifth edition tugs on more heartstrings than its fourth and asks more pertinent questions. Its structure and how it resolves those questions is narrative indiscipline. Pixar may no longer be peerless, but its standards, for Toy Story especially, remain higher than most others in American animation.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.