Toy Story 5 review: 'poignant gags and juicy themes'
The latest Toy Story film tackles the hot-button issue of kids and tech head-on, but the formulaic nature of the storyline is a little dispiriting, writes Alistair Harkness
Toy Story 5 (PG) ★★★
Another enjoyable but unnecessary addition to Pixar’s once-stellar saga about angst-ridden toys grappling with their place in the world, Toy Story 5 confronts the hot-button issue of tech’s detrimental role in the lives of children by placing the increasingly vintage characters from the earlier films in a world where kids prefer screen time to playtime.
With Woody (Tom Hanks) making peace with his own obsolescence as a hand-me-down toy at the end of 2018’s Toy Story 4, this one zeroes in on his cowgirl cohort Jessie (Joan Cusak), whose efforts to surreptitiously help her emotionally struggling eight-year-old owner Bonnie make friends with other children are thwarted by Bonnie’s anxious parents’ decision to cave in and buy her a tablet so she can be like all the other kids.
This being a Pixar film, said tablet, known as a “Lilypad” and voiced by Greta Lee with the patronisingly placid unflappability of an AI chatbot, has a plausibly threatening personality, one that soon absorbs all of Bonnie’s attention and sets about eliminating Jessie from her life, Hal 9000-style, under the auspices of helping Bonnie connect with the world at large.
It’s a good juicy theme and, even though the irony of a company founded by the inventor of the iPhone and the iPad lecturing us on the dangers of big tech isn’t exactly addressed (quite the opposite, there’s even a redemptive story arc for some of the tech in the film), Toy Story 5 nails with unflinching accuracy its addictive nature.
Shots depicting the glow of handheld devices illuminating houses where children sit hunched over screens rather than playing with each other are quietly eerie and stand in marked contrast to the vibrant, painterly interludes that signify Bonnie’s imagination running amok when she plays with her toys. There are poignant gags too as Jessie encounters discarded toys in neighbouring gardens declaring “the age of the toy” to be over with the sort of doom-laden melodrama you might find in an apocalyptic B-movie.
Nevertheless, the formulaic nature of the storyline all this is hanging off is a little dispiriting. Though it kicks off in a fun way with a shipping container full of surplus Buzz Lightyear toys washing up on a deserted island (a sly nod, perhaps, to the catastrophic box-office performance of the 2022 spin-off movie Lightyear), Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) resorts to the standard quest-and-chase structure that’s become the studio’s default setting as Jessie finds herself returned to her original owner’s house and grappling with the abandonment issues so beautifully explored in Toy Story 2.
Speaking of which, Taylor Swift’s much-hyped song for the film, I Knew It, I Knew You, has none of the emotional resonance of Randy Newman’s earlier Sarah McLaughlin-sung ballad When She Loved Me. It’s not even integrated into the film, playing instead over the end credits, like an afterthought or, more likely, a bid to secure the film – and Swift – a best song Oscar next year.
Toy Story 5 is in cinemas from 18 June
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