Toy Story 5

The Glow of Obsolescence

I walked into the theater carrying the exact same baggage you probably have. We've said goodbye to these characters twice now. The third film offered the perfect melancholy send-off to adolescence, and the fourth gave Woody a surprisingly poignant existential out. So, why are we back in the toy box? I was ready to be cynical. I really was. But what Andrew Stanton does with *Toy Story 5* disarms that cynicism almost immediately by making the toys' irrelevance the actual text of the movie.



Stanton, who has been orbiting this universe since the 1995 original, steps into the director's chair here with a surprisingly pragmatic view of franchise longevity. In an interview with *Empire* last year, he argued that nobody is being robbed of their original trilogy just because new stories exist. "There's no promise that it stays in amber," he noted. And he means it. The world of *Toy Story 5* feels aggressively unstuck from the nostalgic amber we expect. Bonnie is eight now. The defining object in her bedroom isn't a sheriff or a space ranger, but a sleek, glowing tablet called the Lilypad.

The threat here isn't a vindictive prospector or a plush bear running a daycare mafia. It's a screen. I keep coming back to an early scene where Woody, Buzz, and Jessie stand at the foot of Bonnie's bed in the dead of night. The only light in the room is the cold, blueish aura of the tablet illuminating the sheets. The toys don't move. They just watch the glow. Stanton's camera lingers on their static, plastic faces for an uncomfortably long time, letting the silence stretch out. You can feel the quiet terror of being replaced not by another physical plaything, but by an algorithm. Greta Lee provides the soothing voice of the Lilypad, and her line deliveries are terrifying precisely because they are so warm and frictionless. She doesn't want to destroy the toys. She doesn't even know they exist.



Tom Hanks is, of course, the emotional anchor. But listen closely to what he's doing with his voice this time around. There's a slight rasp, a weariness that wasn't there thirty years ago. Hanks doesn't try to hide his age, and it works perfectly for a pull-string cowboy who finally realizes his era has truly passed. Watch the way the animators let Woody's shoulders slump when he notices Bonnie hasn't looked away from the screen in three hours. It's a physical surrender. Tim Allen's Buzz Lightyear counters this with his usual bluster, but even his squared-jaw posture seems to deflate when faced with a digital game that does everything he can do, only infinitely faster. Conan O'Brien drops in to briefly steal the show as an intensely anxious new figure named Smarty Pants, vibrating with a frantic, jittery energy that mirrors our own screen-addled brains.



Whether this movie needed to exist at all mostly depends on your tolerance for revisiting old friends who are perpetually in crisis. I'm not sure the second act fully holds together. (It gets a bit bogged down in a loud, chaotic subplot involving a rogue batch of commemorative Buzz action figures that feels imported from a lesser movie). But the emotional core remains stubbornly intact. The film doesn't lazily preach about the evils of technology, which is a massive relief. Instead, it asks a quieter, sadder question: what happens to the things that love us when we forget to look at them?