Toy Story 5 Review: Woody And Buzz Return For An Uneven But Charming Pixar Sequel

So we all understand Pixar's never gonna stop making these movies, right? "Toy Story 3" felt like the ideal ending to one of best movie trilogies of all time, but they kept going. "Toy Story 4" ended with another heartfelt goodbye that could have served as a beautiful coda, but they still kept going. We can ignore "Lightyear" because everyone does. And now with "Toy Story 5," they're not even pretending this is the end. There's no finality, just a continuing cycle. Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), and Jessie (Joan Cusack) will be here long after we're all dead. Hopefully they end up in WALL-E's human relics collection rather than in his trash cubes.

My takeaway from "Toy Story 5" is that the series is in good hands and that it's also not as much for me anymore. And that's a good thing! If this series is to continue, it needs to be for the kids and parents of today rather than for nostalgic childless millennials. It's not that the movie lacks appeal to my demographic — you don't push so hard at the memory of "When She Loved Me" if you aren't trying to bring tears to my eyes. But I also get that part of the reason it has to push so hard is to catch up kids who weren't even alive when the other movies came out.

"Toy Story 5" adapts the franchise's traditional themes to a new threat. As in the first film, the favorite toy fears new competition, and like the second and third, the toys all have to confront the reality that their kids either will or already have outgrown them. What's new here is that the competition is a children's tablet, Lilypad (Greta Lee), and the big new concern is that technology is forcing kids to grow up too fast. The resulting drama makes a smart case for the virtues of traditional playtime, though the logic of how our high-tech antagonist works within the Toy Story universe will leave adult viewers with questions.

Part of the fun of the Toy Story movies is taking a simple, intuitive premise (toys are alive when you're not looking) and playing around with its rules. How much therapy did Sid (Erik von Detten) need after finding out toys are alive? What transformed Forky (Tony Hale) from trash to toy? The inexplicable magic of it all lets you go with it. "Toy Story 5" pushes these sorts of questions even further than the previous films. Some of it's still fun — earlier movies already established toys and animals can interact just fine, so scenes where Jessie rides a real horse or where an army of high-tech Buzz Lightyears encounter woodland critters for the first time fit right in with the fantasy.

With Lilypad, however, the suspension of disbelief threatens to break, in part because the fantasy is weirdly intersecting with reality. Based on Bonnie (now voiced by Scarlett Spears) being four years older than she was in "Toy Story 3," this film is technically an early 2010s period piece predating the current threats of AI. But by being anthropomorphized like the toys while also being a computer, Lilypad is essentially an actual artificial intelligence, and I'm not sure the filmmakers know what to do with that.

Lilypad writes and sends messages to humans of her own accord, which feels too far for a human-toy interaction and also a step beyond the more grounded worries about addiction and cyberbullying as far as human-tech interaction goes. It's the creepiest aspect from an adult perspective of a movie that notably lacks the "scare the kids" horror-lite scenes of the previous movies, perhaps due to being the first made without the involvement of "The Shining" obsessive Lee Unkrich (though it's curiously the first to get a PG rating, something only semi-justified by the stream of potty humor from the Conan O'Brien-voiced Mr. Smarty-Pants). If the intended message is that tech is merely a tool that can be used for both good and ill, giving the tech its own agency makes that message confusing. Your iPad isn't gonna choose to play nice. "Toy Story 5" is a much better movie than "Ralph Breaks the Internet," but any logical complaints you had about that movie's depiction of the internet will also apply here.

"Toy Story 5" actually improves upon its predecessors in its playtime sequences. Andy's (John Morris) action-based play scenes were cute, but the genre-bending toy dramas envisioned by Bonnie and her potential new friend Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) are weirder, funnier, and more stylishly animated. You could look at it as the difference between stereotypical "boy's play" and "girl's play," but it's also evidence of a film more focused on the psychology of play. Andy was always an idealized semi-anachronistic archetype (I remember those DVD special features where every single animator said they were more like Sid as a kid), but Bonnie, a socially awkward kid facing peer pressure to stop playing with toys, is a character that creates more emotional investment in her own right.

Among the toys, this is very much Jessie's movie, which is a smart change-up. She's much less zen about the cycle of toydom than Woody became over the course of the series, lending a different tone to what are now very familiar themes. Buzz gets the funniest subplots. Woody shows up to help out, and I'm not complaining about getting to hear Tom Hanks and Tim Allen bounce off each other some more, but I also distinctively get the sense this whole story could have been told without him — and he's there mainly because he's been the face of the franchise.

Most of the other toys barely get any time in the spotlight. Over five films, the ensemble's grown so large that the majority are reduced to background players. It's amusing noting which actors they got back for minor parts and which ones they didn't: Keanu Reeves reads two lines as Duke Caboom, but Ducky and Bunny are notably mute because I guess Key and Peele aren't reuniting. One of the reasons "Toy Story 2" is the best in the series is because every character gets a chance to shine. I trust these movies will remain good (and keep funding better original films like "Hoppers"). I'm not expecting "Toy Story 2"-level greatness from them again.

"Toy Story 5" opens in theaters on June 19.