Toy Story 5: The Popgeeks Review

In preparation for the release of Toy Story 5, I resolved to watch the complete series of movies leading up to it once more. Unfortunately, the constant firehose of content that is our streaming market only left me time to watch two of the four before June 19 happened. I picked the first one, and then the fourth one, and when you go from one to four instantly, a lot of the changes in Pixar over the last thirty years becomes apparent.

Toy Story 4 is visually shinier and prettier than Toy Story 1; all that water in the opening scene would have been impossible in 1995. But Pixar also used to be a lot edgier in the 90s than today. There are a lot of line-skirting jokes in the first one that prove the leniency of the MPA back then. Toy Story 5 is the very first PG-rated entry in the series, and yer we don’t see anything close to Mr. Potato Head calling Slink a “kiss-ass” by taking off his lips and smooching his own rear with them. Toy Story 4 is comparably mild. Woody and Bo are incredibly horny for each other in that first movie, but once they’re reunited in the Bonnie Era the most they do is stare at one another and smile.

Like the rest of you, I had ambivalent feelings about the necessity of a fifth one of these and whether or not there was a purpose to it beyond making money. But if the day is to come when Pixar makes a pointless, soulless cash-in sequel, it isn’t today. There are two main ways in which Toy Story 5 justifies its own existence:

1. It resolves a plot thread that was introduced in Toy Story 2, and does it beautifully;
2. It makes Conan O’Brien a major figure in the series lore.

I’ve been a Conan fan for a long time; he was the only late-night host I ever cared about (so of course they booted him off). I often have his podcast on in the background while doing work. He’s the only thing that can make me watch an entire Oscars presentation. And he brings his talent here in full force as Mr. Smarty Pants, a now-obsolete “smart toy” whose purpose was to potty-train toddlers. A lot of new actors were announced for this movie and going in, I didn’t know how much big a part O’Brien’s character would play. Turns out he’s one of the central figures.

You wouldn’t expect Toy Story to get topical or echo the rising negative sentiment against Big Tech, but it does so here. The newest threat to the toys’ existence is the proliferation of screens in the common home and children who stare like zombies at tablets instead of doing anything else. They’re told the fact that Bonnie still plays with toys is another rule-breaking element of her bohemian personality and that no one else uses their imaginations anymore. In fact “the age of toys is over.” Since I don’t have any kids, nor any way to observe them in their natural habitat (in someone’s home), I have no way of knowing if they’re right or not. I hope things aren’t as bleak as this movie makes them out to be.

The threat comes home when Bonnie’s parents buy her a Lilypad, a LeapFrog-like device that, like the toys, has a private mind of her own and is obsessive about taking control of Bonnie’s life. For help in resolving the situation, they call in Woody from the amusement park, but his placement in the movie feels shoehorned in. Toy Story 4 was entirely about Woody and after it completely resolved his character arc, there’s nothing really more to say or do with him. It’s more like he’s here because Tom Hanks needs to be in the top billing like he always has.

Like TS4 did with Woody, PS5 spends its majority of time with Jessie: it’s pretty much her movie. She still has the home address of her original owner, Emily, written inside her pant flap and when someone mistakenly believes she belongs there, Jessie finds herself trapped at the location of her greatest trauma, the place she never wanted to return to. It’s here she meets Mr. Smarty Pants and two other “smart toys” that were top of the line a few years ago, then banished to the drawer.

There’s an unexpected subplot that opens the film and continues at various points throughout: the Buzz Lightyear figure has been reissued as a “high-tech version” and fifty directionless Buzzes have escaped from a pallet container that crashed into a deserted island. Pixar has struggled with what to do with Buzz, given he can’t be the same goofball he was before he knew the truth, and that’s what people liked about him. They’ve usually solved this by throwing in another Buzz doll, or having him glitch into “Spanish mode” or something. Unfortunately the Buzz army doesn’t work as well as the movie wants it to, and that’s because they aren’t nearly as goofy or chaotic as they could be! The Buzzes don’t speak much, and we miss those arrogant overwrought speeches that skewered sci-fi tropes. They accept the reality of their being toys too easily, and the way they wind up at Jessie’s farm is a bit of a wild coincidence. It’s missed potential.

The farm turns out to contain the solutions for all the dilemmas in the film, except the “age of toys is over” situation because…well, that one isn’t resolved in real life. The situation at home with Lilypad comes to a natural conclusion though. The Toy Story series has spent much more time fleshing out Bonnie than it ever did Andy; Woody said “we’re here for him when he needs us” but we never actually saw him fulfill that role. Here, the toys make massive efforts to protect Bonnie and push her toward good choices. Bonnie’s storyline contains a good moral about false “friends” who want to change you vs. people who will actually accept you for who you are.

But it’s Jessie’s story that’s the most powerful — it’s been that way since the gut-punch she delivered in Toy Story 2 — and there’s an equally poignant punch to how they deal with it. When the moment hits, you’re gonna have to struggle pretty hard to keep those tears in the ducts. Fair warning.

So I can confirm that, as of now, Pixar STILL has not created a bad Toy Story movie (unless you want to count Lightyear). Director Andrew Stanton made some intelligent choices here that continue the story naturally and provide a satisfying payoff. As for Toy Story SIX….probably. Pixar has made no promises about this being the last one. But where else can the series go from here? An entire movie about the unresolved anxiety issues of Rex? And if the age of toys is really over, how will a Toy Story 6 make sense to begin with? This is Stanton’s last film; the solutions to these questions may be handed to someone new. Hope it’s not the Good Dinosaur guy.