“Toy Story 5” Won’t Leave Kids to Their Own Devices

Ingeniously, Stanton and Harris weaponize a foundational conceit of the “Toy Story” universe—that inanimate objects can have freedom of will, thought, and movement—in order to feed our anxieties about the insidious autonomy of tech and A.I. For parents of young kids, “Toy Story 5” might prove an even more triggering experience than the Pixar coming-of-age films—“Inside Out” (2015), “Inside Out 2” (2024), the jubilant “Turning Red” (2022)—that have imaginatively colonized the inner lives of children and teen-agers. As I watched Stanton’s film, my thoughts drifted to my daughters’ compulsive screen habits, my attempts to curb their iPad addiction by nudging them toward books and toys. (Perhaps Stanton’s next Pixar caper should explore the hidden world of secretly sentient literature: “A Book’s Life.”) I thought about the sensational popularity of the gaming platform Roblox, which, being open to users as young as five, has often been sued for enabling the exploitation of minors. Then, after the film was over, I flashed back to the Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda’s very different, older-skewing animated fantasy, “Belle” (2022)—which unfolds largely within a fictional metaverse where users hide behind elaborate digital masks, chase social-media stardom, and fend off trolls of every persuasion—and idly wondered if this were the future that our children, and Bonnie, had to look forward to.

Pixar being Pixar, there’s only so much tech-dystopia darkness that even the most cutting-edge “Toy Story” movie can countenance. Lily, with her high-tech powers of deception, can arrange for Bonnie’s toys to be boxed up and removed from the bedroom, but in the end she’s more misguided than truly nefarious. She doesn’t turn into a pint-sized HAL 9000 or a psycho-killer Alexa, and she does care about Bonnie’s welfare, deep down in her silicon heart. Happily, Bonnie, for her part, doesn’t fall prey to an e-stalker, though she is subjected to some sneering group-chat abuse, which teaches her an important lesson about bullying, peer pressure, and the instability of online-only friendships.

Fortunately, there’s a real, true friend waiting for her: an equally sweet girl, Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris), who shares Bonnie’s love of analog toys and even briefly inherits her boxed-up collection. The action thus spills out of one house and into another, in much the same way that it did in the very first “Toy Story” (1995). Successive chapters have forced the characters to travel greater and greater distances, and to coördinate dangerously elaborate rescue missions in far-flung locations: playgrounds and pizza parlors, toy stores and day-care centers, antique shops and carnivals. (There’s an amusing roadside gag here that pokes fun at the sheer implausibility of an army of toys, whose movements are ostensibly invisible to the human eye, covering so much ground undetected.) But one of the more clever innovations in “Toy Story 5” is its use of the internet to bridge, or even collapse, those distances. Digital shortcuts abound; tech really is for everything.

One needn’t even be a tablet like Lily to harness the efficiencies of the web. At Blaze’s house, Jessie and the gang meet an interactive potty-training toy called Smarty Pants, a toilet-paper roll with light-up eyes and the voice of Conan O’Brien, who spends the movie gamely dropping one mildly scatological one-liner after another. It’s useful to the plot that Smarty Pants can send and receive messages, though his connection is weak, his battery life wanes, and at times you wonder if he’s defective, as opposed to merely defecative. But the more crucial role that he plays is one of reconciliation. Not all devices are evil, the toys realize, and even the best machines—like even the best toys—will eventually break down and get tossed aside for a shiny new model. This declaration of solidarity, as stirring as it is, ultimately softens and sentimentalizes the film’s trenchant earlier critiques. Even the semi-villainous Lilypad is granted her redemptive moment: a reminder that Pixar is ultimately, like its parent company, Disney, in the business of manufactured reassurance.