Making a sequel to a classic is a bit like gambling. You’re taking the capital created by reputation and goodwill, not to mention years of hard work, and betting you can creatively do it again without harming your legacy–or at least get in the ballpark of what came before. If that’s the case, then Pixar might be on the hottest winning streak in Hollywood history. For more than 30 years, the Bay Area company has bet the house and doubled down again by making one Toy Story movie after another, roughly every seven to 10 years, and more often than not they’ve come out with another stone-cold animated masterpiece. And even when they haven’t, the results were still pretty great.
So those waiting with bated breath can now rest easy. Toy Story 5 is another winning hand. While the overall story of Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and all the rest probably could’ve ended with the perfect sendoff of Toy Story 3—though Toy Story 4 also could’ve been a worthwhile epilogue for Woody, the ragdoll cowboy—Toy Story 5 still justifies its existence by providing a thoughtful expansion on the plights of parenting in the 21st century’s brave new world of tech and screens. And it does this by revisiting what I believe to be the best and most poignant chapter in the plastic saga: Toy Story 2 and the cowgirl who got left behind.
If Toy Story 4 was Woody’s movie, Toy Story 5 belongs to Jessie, the high-energy rough and tumblin’ tomboy given vocal life by Joan Cusack. Something of a sidekick to Tom Hanks’ Woody over the last several films, there was a time in 1999 where the tragedy of a doll abandoned by her teenage owner, plus the musical stylings of Sarah McLachlan, broke enough hearts to get an Oscar nomination. Hence Toy Story 5 choosing in traditional Pixar fashion to telescope right into the emotional turmoil by opening on a few bars of “When She Loved Me” during a flashback of Emily and Jessie playing by a fateful tire swing.
It’s a painful memory for Jessie, the only doll in the Toy Story movies to watch their kid grow up and leave. Twice. It also gives her something amounting to PTSD when, as the top dog sheriff in the bedroom of wee little Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), she gets an anxiety attack as the parents introduce Lilypad, a grotesque training wheels version of the iPad for the elementary school set.
There is a certain bit of irony in a studio co-founded by Steve Jobs now attempting to, even mildly, consider the psychological, emotional, and developmental downsides to screen technology. One senses the film pulls its punches, too, while emphasizing with parents who view Lilypad (voiced here by Greta Lee as a chipper Siri clone) as the best way for their slightly shy and introverted child to make new friends at dance class. All the other girls are doing it, so we can’t have her left behind.
Still, the movie does offer a fairly evenhanded consideration about the advantages and many pitfalls of putting the first device within a child’s reach. Bonnie is immediately glued to the new blue light, barely even noticing her beloved Jessie and Bullseye toys. Yet it’s hard to say the eight-year-old is much happier as Lilypad introduces Bonnie to her first social network of friends—and her first taste of mean-girl bullying when those friends discover Bonnie plays with toys.
The trick of the Toy Story movies, particularly the later ones, is that they’re both a metaphor for childhood and the challenges of raising a child. Especially as Andy got older, and Woody and Buzz started thinking about a life after college, these films have leaned evermore on the adult point-of-view via the metaphor of a toy’s purpose. Despite this relative heaviness, they are still a child’s fantasy, and in the case of Toy Story 5, the misplaced existential fear of being replaced in the original movie takes on hilarious modern context as Jessie, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Rex (Wallace Shawn), and all the rest recognize they are about to be neglected in favor of a screen. Many of the castoffs Woody and Bo Peep (Annie Potts) run into out on the road now are ronin figurines lamenting that “the age of toys is over!” Tech is here.
As with the best Pixar movies, co-writers and co-directors Andrew Stanton and McKenna Harris (the former of whom has been writing these characters since the ‘90s) know how to balance the meta commentary with sincere, affectionate characterization. Jessie and Buzz’s arguments with Lilypad’s smooth, PR-clipped promises of not being their doom are genuinely funny, even as Lilypad seems to be using the internet messenger to make decisions for Bonnie and her parents, as opposed to the other way around.
The film is too sophisticated to have an outright villain—or perhaps too sympathetic for technology—but it knows how to twist the knife and build on a sturdy foundation of characters who have raised children and, at this point, the children of that first crop of fans.
The film also delicately tickles the nostalgia buttons. This is much more Jessie’s story, with the cowgirl and her trusty horse ending up on an odyssey when they are accidentally left behind by Bonnie during a disastrous sleepover, but Woody and Buzz feature just enough to rekindle memories of halcyon Pixar days. The film also has some fun at really underscoring the age of the franchise, with Woody getting a sun spot on his scalp that looks suspiciously like baldness, matching the inexplicable new stuffing in his tummy.
Yet age might be one of the series’ few sore spots as well. Other than a few winking gags at Woody’s expense, the animation does not age. In fact, the surrounding world looks more photorealistic with each passing installment in the series. But the voices are starting to show their wear and tear. It will be interesting to learn if younger audiences will notice or care about the difference, but it is hard not to catch the creep of age in the cadences of Jessie, Buzz, and especially Woody. Two of them might be called cowboy and cowgirl, but they increasingly sound more like grandparents worrying about the youths these days than sprightly, immortal toys.
Toy Story 5 might get away with it, if only just, but a potential Toy Story 6 could risk the cognitive dissonance that occurred in the last Indiana Jones movie where a 40-year-old looking Indy spoke with an 80-year-old man’s vocal inflections.
The passage of time also slips into the margins of Toy Story 5 in a fairly middling subplot involving a squadron of Buzz Lightyear action figures—now updated for the 21st century with wi-fi hotspots!—surviving a crash like the Wild Robot and then journeying into the world, each convinced he is the Buzz Lightyear. In effect it adds some visual sight gags as they get up to preschool-aimed hijinks, but it feels somewhat beneath Pixar and this serjes. It’s more in line with what modern kids might expect from animated movies where the Minions serve up shenanigans for the viewers too young or distracted to follow the main narrative.
It feels like a concession to the times, which as Toy Story 5 admits about technology, is ultimately inevitable. In many ways, though, Toy Story 5 is another successful triumph over the clock. The years may pass, but the studio’s jealous cultivation and curation of the garden Buzz and Woody built remains immaculate.
Toy Story 5 is not necessarily the best of its franchise, nor does it even feel like another ending to a series that’s already closed the book twice on its characters. But it has all the heart and affection that made plastic dolls designed by ones and zeroes feel oh, so alive 31 years ago. The handcrafted love is there, no matter how dazzling the technological accoutrements become. Also it’s a film that will hopefully inspire another generation of viewers to put down the screens, if only for a moment, and pick up the real toys like Jessie, who deserve all the playtime in the world.
Toy Story 5 opens in theaters on Friday, June 19.
