This Toy Story 5 review looks at how Jessie carries Pixar’s latest return to the toy box, turning screen-time anxiety into one more emotional farewell.
Pixar is asking us, yet again, to say goodbye to toys we have already buried twice. It’s a request the studio made in 2010, when Andy handed the box to a little girl named Bonnie and a generation of grown adults pretended they weren’t sobbing over a pull-string cowboy. It made the same request in 2019, when Woody walked out of Bonnie’s room and the series found a second perfect ending it had no right to find. So the easy question hanging over Toy Story 5 is whether anyone at Pixar still has a reason to open this toy box again. The harder question, the one the film keeps pressing gently against your ribs for ninety-odd minutes, is whether you do.
At the center of Toy Story 5 is the smallest war imaginable, fought over the attention of a single eight-year-old. Bonnie is older now, quieter, and her parents have handed her a frog-shaped tablet called Lilypad, voiced by Greta Lee as something soft and reasonable and quietly devouring. The Lilypad doesn’t stomp into the nursery like Sid or loom like Lotso. It simply glows, and Bonnie stops reaching for the shelf. So the toys go to war the only way toys can, which is to say desperately and mostly out of sight.
Andrew Stanton, who once taught a lonely trash robot to love across the silence of space in WALL-E, hands this one not to Woody and not to Buzz but to Jessie, the yodeling cowgirl who has spent four films as everyone’s favorite supporting player and not one of them as the lead. Joan Cusack plays her as brightness stretched over an old, specific loneliness, a toy who knows precisely what it costs to be set down and forgotten. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are here too, warm and familiar and, for once, gracefully in the background. Conan O’Brien turns up as an obsolete learning gadget named Smarty Pants and quietly walks off with every room he’s in.
If this feels different from the Toy Story you grew up on, that’s because it is. There’s no toy-store odyssey and no white-knuckle escape from a moving truck. Toy Story 5 spends most of its running time inside a single house, watching a child drift toward a screen, and the dread it conjures isn’t the dread of the incinerator but something lower and more domestic, the quiet horror of a kid who used to need you and suddenly doesn’t. Stanton shoots the scenes where play actually catches fire by sliding the whole film into a loose watercolor that looks like nothing Pixar has put on screen before. It’s the studio’s most beautiful instinct in years, and its saddest, because the watercolor is precisely what stands to be lost.
Still, the idea isn’t wholly new, and the movie knows it. This franchise has always run on the fear of being replaced. Woody feared Buzz. The toys feared the yard sale, the daycare bin, the cardboard box in the attic, the long slow indifference of a child growing up. A tablet is simply the next thing in that line, except that a tablet isn’t another toy at all; it’s the thing that quietly rewired childhood itself. Stanton and co-writer Kenna Harris occasionally strain under everything they’re juggling, and the picture takes a soft, déjà-vu-heavy first act to find its feet. A subplot nudging Buzz toward a long-delayed confession of feeling for Jessie plays, for a stretch, like a thin pretext to get the gang back into formation, which is exactly the complaint a few critics have leveled. The film flirts, too, with the laziest version of itself, the one where it just wags a finger at screens like an old man hollering at a cloud.
But what Pixar brings, the thing its many imitators never quite manage, is the refusal to let the lecture win. Toy Story 5 isn’t really about toys versus technology. It’s about whether imagination can survive contact with a glowing rectangle, and whether a child’s undivided attention is the last thing in the house worth fighting for. The film’s bravest move lands at the climax, when it declines to smash the tablet, refuses the clean catharsis of destroying the enemy, and settles the whole thing on stranger, gentler, more sociological ground. It trusts that the answer to a screen isn’t the absence of a screen but the presence of another kid. And it lets Jessie’s arc end where the franchise has always been afraid to look, in the plain fact that being loved and being kept were never the same promise. Owen Gleiberman of Variety called the result “a sublime summing up,” and that’s about right; this is a movie that holds all five films up to the light at once and finds the whole shape of them.
The early numbers suggest the goodwill is fully intact. Toy Story 5 posted a franchise-record Thursday preview night in the neighborhood of $14 million, the biggest previews any film has managed in 2026, and trade tracking points its opening weekend toward $140 million or more domestically across roughly 4,400 theaters, with a global start near $275 million. If those figures hold, it’s the largest opening the franchise has ever had, clearing the $120.9 million debut Toy Story 4 managed in 2019, and the biggest domestic launch of the year so far. Critics arrived warm, if a shade more measured than usual; the film settled into the low 90s on Rotten Tomatoes and the low 70s on Metacritic, which makes it, by a hair, the lowest-scored entry in the entire franchise, a peculiar distinction for a series whose floor is still everybody else’s ceiling.
Audiences, for their part, came out wrecked in the best possible way. From the world premiere at the El Capitan to the first Thursday crowds, the verdict has been almost monotonously emotional, a steady chorus of viewers who walked in skeptical and walked out wet-faced, more than a few of them ranking it beside Toy Story 2 and 3 before they’d even reached the lobby. Cusack’s voice work keeps surfacing as the standout, Conan’s gadget keeps getting singled out as the comic engine, and several people warned, half-joking, that you leave wanting to hurl every tablet in your house into the sea. There are skeptics, naturally, who note that a wave of premiere raves this uniform can read a little like advertising, and they aren’t wrong to wait for the dust to settle. But the Taylor Swift song over the end credits, a hushed little thing called “I Knew It, I Knew You,” already has awards watchers murmuring, and the room, by every account, is crying.
So has Pixar pulled off the impossible thing, the one this whole project was built to prove? Not quite, and almost. Toy Story 5 doesn’t fully silence the question of why it exists; nothing could, for a franchise that has already said goodbye twice and meant it both times. What it does instead is find, improbably, one more goodbye worth the tears, and hand it to the one toy who always understood the assignment better than the rest of them. Pixar has spent thirty years teaching us that the things we set down still ache to be picked back up. Toy Story 5 is the first time the studio has asked, with real tenderness, what we lose when a child stops reaching for the shelf at all.
Toy Story 5 is in theaters now. Directed by Andrew Stanton; co-directed by Kenna Harris; written by Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris; with the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Greta Lee, and Conan O’Brien, and an original end-credits song by Taylor Swift.
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