Tech takes center stage in Andrew Stanton’s Toy Story 5. In fact, it’s about the battle between toys and tech, with Jessie (Joan Cusack) taking on Lilypad (Greta Lee), the energetic tablet that Bonnie embraces (Scarlett Spears) to make friends. With chat rooms and virtual games replacing physical contact with toys, playtime has been redefined, and toys are forced to fight back with imagination.

Stanton, who finally takes the directing reins after co-writing the previous four films, leans into the life cycle of toys as it pertains to the relationship between time and tech. He collaborated with longtime producer Lindsey Collins (Finding Nemo, WALL-E) and co-writer, co-director Kenna Harris, who served as story artist on Luca and Inside Out 2, and directed the Luca short Ciao Alberto.

“There’s a beauty to these films that allows us to appreciate and lean into the passing of time in a very contained way that other stories don’t,” Harris said. “And tech is such a juicy thing to talk about. It’s taking everything that’s so alive about a toy’s playtime experience and sucking it all up, putting it onto a screen directly in front of their kid. The child is growing up so rapidly in front of their eyes. Lilypad is this Swiss army knife of skills that a toy could never dream of accomplishing.”

“Tech does provide connection, obviously, and that’s what sells it and what everybody buys into,” Collins added. “We show the benefits of tech, but these are either short-lived or very surface.”

Thus, it was up to Pixar to apply the latest tech advancements to Lilypad and an army of 50 upgraded Buzzes. They even re-imagined more stylized playtimes for Bonnie and Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris), the horse lover who lives on the same ranch that was the previous home of Jessie’s first kid, Emily.

“This was a new playtime opportunity, but how would Bonnie play?” said producton designer Bob Pauley (Toy Story 3and Toy Story 4). “What’s her methodology? We know she’s kind of a crafty person and very artistic with fun colors and patterns. So let’s just set it in her [chaotic] world of colors and pastels and more like an interpretitive kid’s drawing in a way. We came up with line art that we interpreted in 3D, and the background for Forky and Karen Beverly’s wedding under the gazebo was decorated with trees and hedges in the shape of pancakes.This was something that Pixar had never made before.”

Blaze’s playtime imagination, meanwhile, is darker and more sophisticated, set in a palace with lots of intrigue and explosive action. But her imagination is similar enough to Bonnie’s for Jessie to realize that these girls were meant to be friends.

For the frog-inspired Lilypad tablet, Pixar’s art department built upon the foundation of the iPad, led by  Pauley. “We did a lot of early design work on it,” he said. “Deanna Marsigliese did the first pass and then once we got to a basic form and design we liked, it became a character. It was about getting those eyes to look right, making the handle fit right, gettting the form factor correct, all these things that we know because we touch devices.”

Lilypad was actually very complicated for being such a simple rectanglar screen. It needed to be familiar but something never seen before. “We were trying to connect with the audience like that and also coordinate graphics and all the shading,” added VFX supervisor Thomas Jordan (Toy Story 2, Toy Story 4). “Animation too. It goes back to early Pixar, with juice box sort of walking because that’s basically all they can do is pivot on one back corner or the other. We don’t want the iPad to bend, but we still need artistic license to give her emotion. So sometimes we hide little cheats in there. And there was a pretty big breakthrough when we decided to have the little hands and the fingers and toes, because it gave the animators more to play with, so that we could see her actually scrolling and searching on her own screen It’s got to be a character that carries a lot of emotion, too, because you’re lookintg at her when Bonnie’s in her breakdown mode.”

One aspect that guided Stanton early on was distinguishing Lilypad and other devices as tech rather than toys. He wanted this accomplished through the eyes by making them digital-looking from different eras. “We even broke the resolution down a little bit, so it’s really clear,” Jordan continued. “With Lilypad, she’s brand new, cutting-edge technology, which is why you don’t see pixels on her main screen, it’s very high-definition. Animation had full control of the shape of her pupils and her eyelids, but it would all end up being rendered as these jagged pixels. It was a storytelling mechanism for Andrew.”

When it came to lighting Lilypad , she was self-illuminating, which was another trick, to avoid blowing out her screen from the sun or other light sources. However, a big challenge was handling the immense amount of graphics, which had to be done separately and strategically. “When animation was animating Lilypad, her screen was blank because we didn’t know what needed to be on her screen yet,” Pauley explained.

“In order for animation to be able to proceed, we gave them the ability to temporarily sketch ideas,” added Jordan,” like a virtual pencil, where they could mock up ideas for what might be on her screen, and even mock up motion, if Bonnie is dragging her fingers across the screen. And they could approve the rest of Lilypad’s animation: her eyes, her hands, her juice box motion. And then the shot would go to Bob’s team to design the graphics that were actually moving on her screen.”

By contrast, the high-tech Buzzes provided a different set of challenges and opportunities, especially for Pauley, who previously worked on Lightyear in the last two sequels. But this was special: Stanton had this wild idea of opening the film with a shipwrecked cargo of 50 high-tech Buzz toys, who must work together to discover a meaning and mission to their lives. Somehow, they have to tie in to the rest of the story.

“It’s not our Buzz, it’s these new guys, and it’s a different world,” Pauley recalled. “They’ve got new skills, a new animated chest screen, and that was super fun. There were changes in texture, some surfacing, so it has more of an upgraded toy look.”

At first, the chest screen was a simple Star Command symbol, but that fooled early test audiences into thinking they were the same as the old Buzz. “Andrew said we had to do a high-res thing and then we can animate and do storytelling inside that patch,” Jordan added. “When it’s code red, when they all connect. The sync mode, where they’re all in the blue with each other. It’s even set up for the Wi-Fi gag. But that screen really makes a difference, and, to me, it was like, if you’re a kid, that’s what you want on a Buzz Lightyear. You want some cool features that are kind of animated and not just a button that lights.”

But having the Buzzes ride 50 toy horses proved challenging as well. “You had to figure out how to put them on these plastic horses and have them move,” Jordan continued. “It started as sleepless nights trying to figure out how we were going to do this. They all had to animate with their own personality.

“And then, on top of that, the toy horses are quite unique, whereas all the Buzzes are the same models with the same controls. It’s not true of the horses that they ride. They’re bouncing and springing along. That took months to figure out for the first posse sequence and weeks to figure out for the second. You could’ve just copied Buzz’s thing and just made him for all of them, but they all have slightly different ways that they would move. We had multiple techniques that all worked together, which was animating one Buzz at a time, and we would figure out a bunch of different types of walks and runs that these Buzzes might have, and we built up a library of motion.”

“What I love so much about the Buzzes B storyline is that they don’t know who they are or why they’re there or what they’re doing, and neither does the audience,” Pauley suggested. “And we all learn together as they learn one stage at a time.

“They learn that they’re supposed to be scared of humans, that animals are friendly, about the star they’re supposed to be following, and the love of playing with a child,” added Pauley. “It’s such a fun thing that Andrew wrote.”