And now we arrive at the fifth installment of the Toy Story franchise. Following the uninspired fourth film, which ignored most of the toys that enlivened the TS1-3 trilogy in favor of elevating Woody to sainthood, this feature is a definite improvement, one that Pixar surely needed in 2026.

TS5, advertised as “Toys vs. Tech”, has a very basic premise: Children using their imaginations is just as important (if not even more so) than hypnotically interacting with devices and screens. Oh, the screens have their place and are not exclusively evil, but they must balance with non-tech creativity and real, up-close interpersonal interaction with friends of the flesh-and-blood type.

In a prologue, we meet fifty Buzz Lightyear toys stranded on an island after a crate of them crash-landed. (Don’t worry about the space rangers; they’ll weave in and out of the story several times. 

As for that story, the initial intrusion in the toy’s life with Bonnie, their second owner, comes in the form of Lily Lilypad, a juiced-up version of the original 1999 educational toy Leap Pad. Lily can access the Internet, work social media, play games, and, in short, do everything a modern iPad can do. Bonnie’s parents purchased Lily, fearing that Bonnie was experiencing social isolation from tech-savvy cohorts. Bonnie soon becomes addicted to Lily to the point where she ignores her old toys.

Cowgirl Jessie, now the leader of the Toy Crew in Woody’s absence, confronts Lily with the fact that Bonnie needs real friends. Lily sends a friend request to a girl in Bonnie’s dance class. But insecure Jessie is then afraid of losing Bonnie’s affection and contacts Woody (who is helping abandoned toys find homes along with Bo Peep and Duke Kaboom) for help via walkie-talkie. In a subplot, Buzz is trying to work up the courage to ask Jessie for her hand in whatever passes for marriage in toy world (vaguely hinted at in TS3). Bonnie gets invited to her first sleepover, but Jessie and her horse Bullseye stow away in her backpack to make sure that all goes well.

It doesn’t. The girls are thrilled to see Lily, but much less happy to see Jessie and Bullseye. The girls laugh poor Bonnie out of the sleepover. Jessie and Bullseye escape the humiliating ride home, and circumstance finds them back at the very home Jessie first came from. Living there now is the Manoukian family, which includes daughter Blaze, a girl no older than Bonnie. Blaze would rather enact wild adventures with pet pig Jimmy Dean than stare at screens, and Jessie is determined to have the imaginative girl hook up with Bonnie.

How this happens takes up the last third of the film, and I’ll spare you the lengthy exposition while avoiding the spoilers. The remaining film offers a truly heartbreaking reason for Jessie’s concern about losing Bonnie, as well as a thrilling chase scene typical of most Pixar films. Suffice to say that no device, including Lily, is truly evil, and three other devices turn out to be useful and heroic. Lily is redeemed, Bonnie and Blaze play up a storm, and even the haughty kids across the street join in the fun.

And the fifty Buzz Lightyears? I’ll leave you to enjoy how their saga ends up.

The main voice cast is little changed; you all know who they are, so here’s a shout-out to some stellar newcomers that enhance the picture. Conan O’Brien is a scene-stealer as the snarky toilet-training device Smarty Pants. Also joining the device voiceover parade are Shelby Rabara (Snappy) and Craig Robinson (Atlas). Topping the devices: Greta Lee as Lilypad. Kudos to Scarlett Spears (Bonnie) and Mykal-Michelle Harris (Blaze), an enthusiastic pair of girls indeed. Andrew Stanton’s direction is as steady as ever.

Way back in 1985, ten years before the first Toy Story movie, the highest-grossing animated film was Nelvana’s The Care Bears Movie, which contained nary a smidge of computer-generated animation. The most technically advanced toy was Teddy Ruxpin, a crude animatronic teddy bear produced by Worlds of Wonder. Today, a $250M animated film powered by the hyperadvanced Presto animation system and the newest version of Renderman (XPU) is the pinnacle of CGI. Riggers are now nearly obsolete. iPads for kids are, in reality, fully functional PCs even if they look like happy frogs. 

It’s amazing how two products grew exponentially alongside each other in what must be considered a brief period – 41 years – just about within the lifetimes of many of you reading this. 

Something to ponder: Is Lily actually a toy, albeit a very advanced one? If Snappy, Smarty Pants, and Atlas are precedents to Lily, why do they look like toys instead of educational devices? Are Bullseye or Mr. Potato Head less of a toy because they lack programmed abilities? Where on the scale does that put Buzz?

By the fantasy rules of the Toy Story franchise, every toy (or tech device) has emotional capacity and self-determination to an astonishing degree, so the point is moot: This movie is, in the end, a tribute to both the past and future of children and a statement about what connects them, be it playful imagination or screened devices. In Stanton’s optimistic view, children can, and should, have room for both. It is no accident that the film climaxes with Bonnie and Blaze staging a pretend wedding between Buzz and Jessie with the devices in happy attendance.

Verdict: Far better than Toy Story 4, but best evaluated as a separate film from the Toy Story trilogy. 

Disclaimer: I wrote this review without the use of ChatGPT, Adobe, Google, Grok, or any other AI writing tool, including Lilypad Anthropic.