We don’t look a gift horse in the mouth – especially not when he’s four inches tall and called Bullseye. So let’s start with the positive: Toy Story 5, the latest chapter in Pixar’s flagship franchise, is essentially a reunion tour. It’s about nostalgia, about the greatest hits, about the joy of seeing old faces again. Or in this case: hearing old voices again, one in particular. Welcome back, Joan Cusack – her portrayal of Jessie, the yodeling cowgirl introduced over a quarter century ago in Toy Story 2, has always been one of the series’ highlights. The actress had more or less disappeared from the scene since the last “Toy Story” part and a brief appearance in the second season of the streaming series “Homecoming”. At the film’s premiere last week, she told a reporter on the red carpet that she had spent the last six years living a normal life in Chicago. You were missing, Ms. Cusack.
The best thing about this late series entry is that Jessie (and therefore Joan) is finally the center of attention – she has become the undisputed number one in the toy box. She’s Bonnie’s unofficial favorite, the nine-year-old girl who likes to send the whole gang through weddings and murder mysteries in the afternoons. The pretend groom is Buzz (Tim Allen), the space ranger who is completely infatuated with his sassy bride-to-be – he would like to make things official if he didn’t stutter so terribly around her. However, Jessie has no time for this fuss. The lady with the red Stetson has a mission.
Because Bonnie is an introverted child, shy to the bone. She would like to connect with the twins across the street, but every time she tries to invite them to play, her own social awkwardness trips her up. Plus, the kids on her street—and in her neighborhood, and at her school, and probably for a 90-mile radius—no longer play with dolls, plastic dinosaurs, and Slinky dogs. They have iPads. In the “Toy Story” universe, this digital harbinger of doom is called LilyPad and sounds like Greta Lee, who puts on a passive-aggressively polite voice. It connects children to “the pond,” where they can text, play, and behave like the cell phone-addicted zombies commonly called “adults.”
Screens instead of toys
Bonnie’s parents, worried that their daughter will never find a “real” boyfriend, buy her a LilyPad. And then the big complaining begins. “The age of toys is over!” shouts an excited figure. The era of ubiquitous screens has arrived. The toy goes into the garage. Jessie finally calls the cavalry – in the form of Woody (Tom Hanks), who now saves lost toys together with Bo Peep and the entire crew from “Toy Story 4”. But after a LilyPad incident goes horribly wrong at a sleepover, the cowgirl decides to take matters into her own little plastic hands. And because Jessie is known to have a serious problem with abandonment – whenever her owners get older and grow up – it is only logical that she and Bullseye end up in the exact place where their childhood trauma, accompanied by Sarah McLachlan, once began.
Keyword the past: Has it really been over three decades since the first “Toy Story” film appeared and revolutionized modern animated films forever? In the mid-nineties, his mix of then-state-of-the-art technology and old-fashioned, emotionally gripping storytelling felt like an evolutionary leap for the medium. Move over, Mickey—there’s a new sheriff (and, er, spaceman) in town! Multiple generations grew up with Woody and Buzz’s adventures, and this tender, funny homage to the things of childhood became the cornerstone of the Pixar empire. The Bay Area company has experienced successes, failures, scandals and the growing pains that come with brand-name companies whose films become a genre unto themselves. But they always had their flagship IP, the title that started it all and defined what a Pixar film is.
So no one blinked when Sequel and Drequel followed – both happily expanding the universe that “Toy Story” had established, and both proving better (at least in the opinion of many) than the original. If Pixar had stopped with Toy Story 3 in 2010, they would have left on a high, leaving the title in pristine condition. We don’t agree with Quentin Tarantino on a lot of things, but we completely agree with his assessment that it’s an almost perfect film trilogy. When a fourth film hit theaters in 2019, you could feel the seams starting to tear. Still, milking the series for another round was still forgivable. A fifth part? That would have gone too far.
Well-intentioned, poor in ideas
“Toy Story 5” comes with a warning, a sense of mission and a lot of windmills to fight against. We live in a world where screens have not only taken over our dwindling attention, but have distorted the entire concept of childhood, the film tells us. The idea of gaming has been replaced by ready-made distractions masquerading as user interaction, and the devices that promoted online brain rot and real-world division are now targeting our children. Technology once gave us a world in which animated toys (and bugs, and cars, and even the joy of a teenager) moved with a fluidity and artistry that took your breath away. Now technology is the villain – which is hard to argue with in 2026 – and the further away children, our future, get from analog toys, the less likely it is that they will develop into healthy people. No objection from us.
We suspect the irony is not lost on Pixar that their film, which rails against anti-social tendencies, is destined to be watched endlessly on screens and devices not unlike the LilyPad. Whether they realize the larger irony that a film about the dangers of outsourcing fantasy itself suffers from a glaring lack of imagination is another matter. “Toy Story 5” is a philippic in search of a story, and not even Jessie’s heartfelt tale of healing her owner’s loneliness and overcoming her own story of heartbreak can stave off the disappointment of dwindling returns. (Although Cusack does her best to sell the little heroine’s vulnerability and redemption, and once again you realize how much you’ve missed this actress.) Everything surrounding her story – the army of stranded Buzz action figures in search of a leader, Woody’s return at halftime, the antiquated first-generation gadgets of another, also socially awkward teenager named Blaze – somehow feels like filler. At least we’re getting a new Taylor Swift song.
Why are you doing this, Pixar? I mean, we know why [man höre das Geräusch von Millionen Münzen, die aus einem Spielautomaten gespuckt werden]. But regardless of legitimate concerns about screen time or not, it doesn’t feel like there’s any reason for this film to exist other than to keep shareholders happy. This fifth series installment is designed to be a cautionary tale for our contemporary moment of crisis – for Silicon Valley’s stranglehold over our lives. But it is even more of a cautionary tale about brand management. This is what happens when you beat a franchise to death.