Film Review · Pixar / Disney · Animation · 2026
Toy Story 5
Directed by Andrew Stanton · Screenplay: Andrew Stanton and Kenna HarrisI loved this film. Pixar returning to Toy Story after seven years felt like a risk, and it paid off in ways I genuinely did not see coming. Toy Story 5 is a good film. Not just good for a fifth installment. Just good.
Bonnie receives a frog-shaped tablet called Lilypad as a gift and almost immediately starts ignoring her toys. What I expected was the usual story, technology bad, toys good, screens are the enemy. What I got was something much more interesting.
The film does not frame technology as the villain. Lilypad is not a monster. She is new and she is trying to help in the only way she knows how. The film finds a way to say that technology and imagination can coexist, that Bonnie does not have to choose, and it earns that conclusion without feeling preachy. That balancing act is the film's best quality and the thing that sets it apart from what this story could have been in less careful hands.
Jessie and Buzz
Woody is here. He is fine. But this is not his film anymore and the movie knows it. This installment belongs to Jessie and Buzz, and that is exactly the right call. Joan Cusack's Jessie has been the emotional backbone of this franchise since Toy Story 2 and here she finally gets the spotlight she deserves.
Tim Allen's Buzz gets some of the film's best sequences, including an early setpiece with fifty Buzz Lightyear units stuck in demo mode that is both hilarious and surprisingly touching. The relationship between the two of them is the heart of the film. By the end, when Bonnie and her new friend pretend to marry Jessie and Buzz during a play session, I was not expecting to feel anything. I felt everything.
Toy Story 5 does what the best sequels do. It earns its place in the series without trying to replace what came before.
Smarty Pants
Conan O'Brien voices Smarty Pants, a motion-activated toilet training toy. That sentence alone tells you everything about why this character works. Conan's specific energy, that mix of confidence and barely contained chaos, is perfectly suited to a potty training device who somehow ends up being one of the most important characters in the film. Every scene he is in is the best scene in the film.
The Film Overall
Andrew Stanton directed the original Toy Story and Finding Nemo. He knows what he is doing. The film looks extraordinary as all Pixar films do now, but more importantly it feels like it was made by people who understood what made the first films special. It is not trying to recreate Toy Story 3's emotional devastation. It is telling its own story, in its own key, and trusting the audience to meet it there.
My only hesitation is that the film does not quite reach the heights of Toy Story 2 or 3. It is a very good film, not a transcendent one. But that is a high bar and the fact that we are even comparing it to those films is already a compliment. Taylor Swift wrote and performed the original song "I Knew It, I Knew You" for the film. It is very good.
The Verdict
Toy Story 5 earns its place in the series without trying to replace what came before. Jessie and Buzz carry it beautifully, Conan O'Brien's Smarty Pants is the character of the summer, and the film's refusal to make technology the villain makes it smarter than it had any obligation to be.
Four out of five. Go see it.