Toy Story 5 review – a heartfelt return to form

Toy Story 5 had every reason to feel unnecessary, and almost none of that worry survives contact with the film.

Seven years after Toy Story 4 closed Woody’s story with as much finality as a billion-dollar franchise will ever allow, the fifth film makes its case quickly and convincingly: by handing the reins to Jessie, leaning into a screen-time theme that could have been preachy and isn’t, and trusting Joan Cusack to carry the emotional weight she’s never quite been given before. It doesn’t reach the gut-punch of Toy Story 3, and it isn’t trying to. What it does instead is the most surprising thing a fifth entry could manage — it justifies its own existence. If you’re wondering whether it’s worth the ticket, the answer is yes, and take the kids who can’t put the tablet down.

What it gets right

The smartest decision Toy Story 5 makes is structural, and it’s there in the opening act: this is Jessie’s film.

Set roughly two years after Toy Story 4, Bonnie has drifted from her toys towards a tablet, and it’s Jessie — not Woody — who feels the threat most sharply and drives the response to it. Putting her at the centre gives the franchise something it has quietly needed for two decades. Joan Cusack has voiced Jessie since 1999, mostly as the energetic second-tier favourite, and given a lead she brings a plucky warmth and a real undercurrent of vulnerability. The “When She Loved Me” sequence in Toy Story 2 proved Jessie could anchor genuine feeling. This is the first time a whole film is built on that.

The emotional beats land because the film slows down for them. Jessie’s fear runs deeper than a gadget. What frightens her is being needed, and the question of what happens to you when the thing that gave your life meaning moves on without you. That’s the franchise’s oldest and best theme, and routing it through Jessie rather than Woody keeps it from feeling like a retread of ground Toy Story 3 and 4 already covered.

Then there’s the animation, which is some of the most beautiful work Pixar has put on screen in years. The studio has had the technical ceiling for a long time, but a few sequences here genuinely show off — texture, light, and a tactile sense of how these toys move through a child’s world. It’s a film that rewards the biggest screen you can find it on.

And it’s funny. Properly funny, in the dry, character-first way the series has always done best, rather than the gag-a-second style that lesser animated sequels reach for. The humour serves the characters instead of interrupting them.

The screen-time message, and why it lands

This is where Toy Story 5 will divide people, and why I think Pixar got the messaging right here.

The premise — a tablet named Lilypad, “Lily” for short and voiced by Greta Lee, becomes the new favourite and threatens to make the toys obsolete — could have been a finger-wagging lecture about kids and screens. The easy version of this film treats the tablet as a villain and technology as the enemy. The more dishonest version pretends screens aren’t a real fixture of childhood at all. Toy Story 5 does neither.

Instead it argues for balance, and it earns the argument. Lily isn’t evil. She loves Bonnie. She wants Bonnie to make friends, hit her milestones, grow up well. The film’s resolution isn’t “throw the iPad away” — it’s that technology is brilliant for a great many things and a poor substitute for presence, for real play, for being in the room with the people who love you. As one line in the film puts it, “toys are for play, but tech is for everything.” The film’s whole project is gently disagreeing with the second half of that sentence.

That message matters more right now than a Toy Story sequel has any obligation to. For the generation of children growing up with a screen permanently within reach, and for the parents handing the screen over because the summer holidays are long and the day is hard, a film that says use the tools, don’t let the tools use you is doing something genuinely valuable. CNN’s health desk framed it well, pointing out that the film treats excess, not technology itself, as the real problem. NPR made the related point that the film gets at something true, because keeping kids off screens through a long summer is genuinely difficult, and Toy Story 5 knows it.

What keeps the message from curdling into a lecture is that it lands as observation rather than instruction, threaded through Jessie’s arc rather than bolted on as a moral.

The craft behind it

Toy Story 5 is directed by Andrew Stanton, with McKenna Harris co-directing. Stanton is returning to the franchise that helped build Pixar — he wrote on the original and directed Finding Nemo and WALL-E, two of the studio’s high-water marks. His instincts show in the restraint: this is a film confident enough to be quiet, to let an emotional beat sit, to make its argument without underlining it.

The voice cast does a lot of the heavy lifting. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are reliably excellent as Woody and Buzz in supporting turns, but the film belongs to Cusack, and the decision to build around her is the single best call the production made. Among the new additions, Conan O’Brien voices Smarty Pants, a self-regarding potty-training toy who is exactly as pleased with himself as that description suggests, and a nice reminder the series can still find fresh comic territory in a toy box this familiar.

Should you watch it?

Yes, and see it in the cinema rather than waiting for Disney+. The animation is built for a big screen, and the emotional beats play better in a dark room than they will on a laptop with notifications sliding in at the edges, which, given the subject matter, would be a particular irony.

It’s the rare family film with a genuine reason to exist beyond the box office. Younger children will get the toys, the jokes, and the spectacle. Older kids, the tablet generation the film is quietly speaking to, might absorb the message without ever feeling lectured. And parents will find more in it than they’re expecting, both in the screen-time theme and in Jessie’s arc about being needed and then, slowly, being needed differently.

If you’ve checked out of the franchise because four films felt like enough, this is the one worth coming back for.