Toy Story 5 has the unenviable job of walking back into a room where the lights had already been turned off twice. Toy Story 3 gave Andy, Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the gang a farewell that still ranks among Pixar’s cleanest emotional landings. Toy Story 4 then gave Woody a separate ending, sending him into a new life outside Bonnie’s room. So the first question hanging over Andrew Stanton’s new sequel is simple: why return?
The answer is smart enough to justify the risk. Bonnie, now eight years old, still plays with her toys, staging elaborate little dramas with Jessie, Buzz, Forky, Bullseye, and the rest of Andy’s old hand-me-downs. The problem is that other kids have moved on to screens.
Bonnie wants friends, but the children around her seem to speak a social language built from tablets, group chats, games, and friend requests. Her parents, worried that she is becoming isolated, buy her a frog-shaped device called Lilypad.
That premise gives Toy Story 5 a clean new threat. The enemy is no longer a jealous toy, a collector, a daycare tyrant, or the passage of time in its old form. It is the screen sitting between a child and the room around her.
Jessie Gets the Story She Deserved
The best choice Stanton and co-writer Kenna Harris make is moving Jessie into the lead. Woody and Buzz remain important, but this is Jessie’s film, and that shift gives Toy Story 5 a wound the series has been carrying since Toy Story 2. Jessie knows what it means to be loved by a child and then left behind. Her old owner Emily did that to her, and Pixar once turned that memory into one of its most devastating sequences. Here, the pain returns in a different shape.
Joan Cusack plays Jessie with the same bright nervous energy that has always defined the character, but she gets a wider emotional range this time. When Bonnie stages a toy wedding between Forky and his plastic-knife partner, Jessie beams with the confidence of a toy who still matters. When she sees the twin boys next door ignoring the physical world for their devices, her confidence starts to fracture. When a chorus of discarded toys tells her that the age of toys is over, the line lands like a diagnosis.
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The sleepover sequence is where the film cuts deepest. Jessie sneaks along with Bonnie and Bullseye, believing she can protect her child from the coldness of this new social world. Instead, Bonnie becomes embarrassed by the presence of toys. Jessie and Bullseye are tossed back into the car, then end up separated from Bonnie entirely. For Jessie, this is not a mishap. It is history repeating itself.
The return to Emily’s old farmhouse sharpens that fear. An elderly couple finds Jessie and Bullseye, notices Emily’s old address written inside Jessie’s chaps, and brings her back to the place where she once belonged. Emily is gone. The house now belongs to Blaze, another imaginative child who may be the friend Bonnie needs. Jessie’s line, “I can’t love another kid just to find out I never mattered,” carries the whole arc. It is a toy speaking, yes, but it is also the language of anyone who has been necessary for a while and then replaced.
Lilypad and the Trouble With Modern Play
Lilypad is an easy idea to mishandle, because a movie about children and screens can tip into scolding fast. Toy Story 5 does stumble near that edge. Jessie gives a few speeches about what Bonnie needs, and the first half can feel too eager to explain its lesson. The film works better when it lets behavior do the talking: Bonnie going quiet in a hostile group chat, kids sitting in the same neighborhood but barely meeting each other’s eyes, a sleepover where a toy becomes a source of shame.
Greta Lee voices Lilypad with a polished, almost syrupy certainty. She never sounds evil in the usual animated-movie sense. She sounds optimized. That makes her funnier and more unsettling. Lilypad believes she is helping Bonnie by connecting her to classmates through online games and digital invites. Her failure is not malice. It is the belief that friendship can be organized like an app interface.
The film is careful enough to make Bonnie’s parents part of the issue without turning them into villains. They buy Lilypad because they are worried about their daughter. A small remote-work gag, with an adult stuck in video-call panic and shouting “you’re muted,” broadens the joke nicely. Children are not the only ones hypnotized by rectangles. The house itself has changed.
I like that Toy Story 5 eventually rejects the simplest possible answer. It does not say tech is poison. That would be a strange sermon from Pixar, and a dishonest one. Instead, it separates tools from habits. Lilypad creates harm when she replaces play, face-to-face risk, and self-expression. Other devices become helpful once they are tied to care and creativity. The distinction matters, and the film earns it through the characters Jessie meets at the farmhouse.
Obsolete Gadgets, New Jokes
Blaze’s old devices are the film’s sharpest comic additions. They are tech, but they are also abandoned objects, which means they understand the toys’ fear from another angle. The so-called AA Team consists of Atlas, a GPS hippo voiced by Craig Robinson; Snappy, a children’s camera voiced by Shelby Rabara; and Smarty Pants, a toilet-training gadget voiced by Conan O’Brien.
Smarty Pants is the standout. Potty humor is usually the fastest route to lazy animation comedy, but O’Brien’s performance turns the character into a strange little miracle of timing. He is proud, needy, malfunctioning, and weirdly wounded by his own purpose. The joke works because it is built from what the object is. A toilet-training device would have a very specific view of human achievement. Pixar follows that logic all the way down.
Atlas and Snappy give the farmhouse stretch a practical energy. They help Jessie find routes, clues, and ways to communicate, but they also reinforce the film’s larger point: every shiny new object eventually becomes old. Lilypad looks invincible because she is current. Smarty Pants, Atlas, and Snappy remind us that current is a temporary condition.
This section of the movie also lets Pixar enjoy the edges of its world. A bendy pizza slice with sunglasses, a group of forgotten toys awaiting their child’s return, and Forky’s awkward married life all keep the film from becoming a lecture. The best Toy Story jokes often come from taking a toy’s design completely seriously. Toy Story 5 remembers that. A GPS hippo does not merely give directions; he has an entire personality shaped by the concept of direction.
Woody, Buzz, and the Weight of the Past
The legacy characters are both a gift and a complication. Woody returns from his post-Toy Story 4 life to help, and Tom Hanks still brings warmth to every line. The film gives Woody a chipped bald spot, a little added weight, and a red poncho that becomes its own gag. Some of that is funny. Some of it feels like the movie knows he has aged but has not fully decided what that should mean.
Woody is least useful when the story tries to restore him to his old command position. Jessie has the emotional stakes. Buzz has a personal thread, with his nervous attempt to propose to Jessie. The new devices have the freshest comic texture. Woody works best as support, especially once the film lets him move into the background and deliver small bursts of cowboy competence.
Buzz has a stranger path. His bashfulness about Jessie softens him in a sweet way, and Tim Allen’s familiar heroic stiffness plays nicely against romantic anxiety. Still, the film misses a chance to let Buzz take fuller leadership. Once Woody enters planning mode, Buzz’s possible growth gets narrowed. That is the franchise problem in miniature: the old icons are beloved, but they can crowd the newer emotional shape if the film lets them.
The army of next-gen Buzz Lightyears almost has the opposite issue. Their plot starts far away from Jessie’s story, with a lost shipping container and a mission-driven march toward Star Command. At first, it feels like a detachable action short. Once the Buzz brigade joins the main rescue, the idea finally clicks. Their drone abilities, hotspot functions, and hive-minded heroism give the second half a burst of physical comedy and adventure momentum.
Pixar’s Craft Still Knows How to Play
Toy Story 5 may not deliver the same technological shock as the original film once did, but Pixar’s craft remains startling in small ways. A suburban shot with trees, sky, and a school bus has a clean, almost photographic texture before the children enter the frame and return it to animation. The screen-lit bedrooms create a quiet visual joke: every child is alone in a different room, glowing the same color.
The imagination sequences are the prettiest parts of the movie. When Bonnie turns a wedding, a ball, or a mystery into play, the animation shifts into a looser, storybook style. That change matters. It shows us what the toys are fighting for better than any speech about screen time could. Play is not framed as nostalgia. It is framed as authorship. Bonnie is shy in the social world, but with toys in her hands, she directs whole genres.
The rural farmhouse scenes give Jessie’s old fear a gentler visual space. The woodsy backgrounds and quieter pacing around Blaze’s home make the Emily connection feel present without dragging Emily back into the plot. That restraint is important. Bringing Emily back would have been too neat. Letting Jessie face the absence of Emily, then notice Blaze’s creativity, gives her closure without damaging the memory that made her character matter in the first place.
Randy Newman’s score helps keep that emotional line steady. The music does not need to announce the sadness every time Jessie looks back. It often sits under the scene like a memory the character is trying not to touch.
The Second Half Finds the Movie
Toy Story 5 has a heavy first stretch. Bonnie’s loneliness, Jessie’s panic, the online cruelty, and the repeated warnings about screens create a mood that can press down on the comedy. The film becomes livelier once Jessie’s goal changes from getting back to Bonnie to connecting Bonnie with Blaze. That is where the story’s lesson stops sounding like a parental warning and starts feeling like a dramatic need.
Bonnie does not simply need “less screen time.” She needs someone who can meet her imagination. Blaze is that person. The film’s final movement works because it makes friendship physical again: toys are moved, plans are built, devices are repurposed, and children have to be brave enough to show who they are in the same room.
That is a classic Toy Story idea in a new costume. The series has always been about objects whose purpose depends on human attention, but Toy Story 5 widens the question. What happens when children still need play but are taught to perform connection before they know how to make it?
The film answers with Jessie, a cowgirl doll carrying decades of abandonment, and Bonnie, a shy child who needs one good friend brave enough to be weird with her. For a sequel that had every reason to feel unnecessary, that is a real reason to exist.
Toy Story 5 is an American animated adventure comedy-drama film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures, celebrating its global world premiere in Los Angeles on June 9, 2026, ahead of its wide theatrical rollout across the United States on June 19, 2026. This highly anticipated fifth main installment in the iconic franchise follows the beloved toys as they face an entirely new kind of threat when technology begins to dominate the household, leaving Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and the rest of the group struggling to compete for their children’s attention against the addictive draw of digital tablets. Audiences looking to catch the movie can experience it exclusively on the big screen during its summer theatrical window before it becomes available for online streaming on Disney+ later in the year.
Where to Watch Toy Story 5 (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Toy Story 5
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Release date: June 19, 2026
Rating: PG
Running time: 102 minutes
Director: Andrew Stanton, McKenna Harris
Writers: Andrew Stanton, Kenna Harris
Producers and Executive Producers: Lindsey Collins, Jessica Choi, Pete Docter, Jonas Rivera
Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Greta Lee, Conan O’Brien, Tony Hale, Craig Robinson, Shelby Rabara, Scarlett Spears, Mykal-Michelle Harris, Matty Matheson, John Ratzenberger, Wallace Shawn, Blake Clark, Jeff Bergman, Anna Vocino, Annie Potts, Bonnie Hunt, Kristen Schaal, Ernie Hudson, Bad Bunny, Keanu Reeves
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Matt Aspbury, Jean-Claude Kalache
Editors: Jennifer Jew
Composer: Randy Newman
The Review
Toy Story 5
Toy Story 5 earns its trip back to the toybox by giving Jessie the emotional lead and turning screen time into a real threat to play, imagination, and childhood friendship. The first half gets a bit lecture-heavy, and Woody feels less necessary than the film wants him to be, but the second half finds the adventure, humor, and feeling Pixar does best. It is not the series’ finest hour, but it is a worthy one.
PROS
- Jessie’s strong central arc
- Joan Cusack’s tender voice work
- Funny obsolete-tech characters
- Beautiful imagination sequences
- Strong second-half momentum
CONS
- Heavy-handed early screen-time message
- Woody feels partly tacked on
- Buzz’s arc loses space
- First half leans gloomy
