Toy Story 5: Slick but Soulless, Lacking Jeopardy and Passion

The fifth episode of the Toy Story franchise is as slick and smooth as you like, as glitchless as Toy Story 6 or Toy Story 7 might be … or will be. As a piece of family-entertainment content it has the unblemished sheen of a brand new smartphone. But at heart, it has gone dead. For all the intensive, high-energy creative work that has clearly gone into this film’s every frame, the jeopardy, the novelty, the ideas and the passion are lacking; the crucial Toy Story theme of mortality feels underpowered, and the film even calamitously loses its nerve with its own big idea – those squeamish about spoilers had better look away now – the sinister way addictive tech devices are undermining the imaginative play that kids once had with honest-to-goodness toys.

Here a creepy tablet device called Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee) enters the children’s world, but ultimately proves to be capable of sentimental self-sacrificial heroism when it comes to their mental health. Really? At least Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, the villain from TS3, had the courage of his evil convictions.

We are back in the world of toys and their secret existences, hilariously leading independent lives when the kids aren’t looking: Jessie the cowgirl (Joan Cusack) still belongs to the kid called Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) from the fourth movie with a bunch of other toys including stalwart Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), the astronaut who is sheepishly in love with Jessie. Meanwhile, Buzz’s legendary TS co-star, cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) – whose one-time rivalrous pairing with Buzz was rooted in the now pretty much forgotten fact that sci-fi stories replaced westerns in US pop culture – is living away from them in a kind of feral outdoor existence away from human control with some other toys, romantically paired with Bo Peep (Annie Potts). These days Woody has a bald patch and a growing paunch, human fallibilities which mysteriously don’t affect Buzz or Jessie.

Poor shy Bonnie is ostracised because she’s the only kid for miles around who still plays with toys and isn’t torpidly hypnotised by a tech device. When she gets a Lilypad, she is initially thrilled by how it connects her with other girls but is then lured into a world of cruelty and online bullying.

Meanwhile, Jessie, through a hugely convoluted plot complication that needs a rogue platoon of upgraded Buzzes to sort out, comes across a great kid called Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) a real horse lover and toy enthusiast who lives on a farm and could make a great best friend for Bonnie. A new modest-hero gang arises: obsolete battery-powered proto-tech devices with LCD displays like toilet trainer Smarty Pants (Conan O’Brien) whose narrative function is perhaps to introduce the idea that tech maybe isn’t all bad.

Every conversation around the Toy Story franchise comes back to the legendary moment in TS2 when Jessie sings her heart-wrenching song When She Loved Me – Randy Newman’s masterpiece – about how her owner has fallen out of love with her, a song which speaks directly and devastatingly to parents who fear the day their children will no longer need or want them.

The When She Loved Me moment is recalled in TS5, prominently in a new song by Taylor Swift, but also in terms of the plot point itself which is revived and resolved in a very spurious and unsatisfying way. It’s almost incredible to think that the Toy Story series is more than 30 years old, a central plank of the Pixar animation golden age. But now it is played out and IP exhaustion has set in.