Toy Story 5 begins with a problem the franchise was always going to face. The child is still in the room, but her attention is somewhere else.
Bonnie receives Lilypad, a frog-shaped tablet voiced by Greta Lee, and the toys discover that abandonment no longer requires a child to grow up or leave home. Bonnie can sit inches away from Jessie, Buzz, and the rest of them while disappearing into another world. For toys whose purpose depends on being noticed, the tablet is not simply competition. It is proof that physical closeness no longer guarantees connection.
Andrew Stanton and co-director Kenna Harris are smart enough not to make Lilypad evil. She is useful, responsive, and designed to provide exactly what Bonnie asks for. Greta Lee gives the device a pleasant, frictionless voice, the sound of technology that never appears tired, confused, or unwilling to play. The threat is not that Lilypad hates the toys. It is that she can satisfy Bonnie without needing anything from her.
Jessie becomes the film's natural center. Woody has left with Bo Peep, and Jessie now carries the responsibility he once treated as an identity. Joan Cusack brings the same explosive energy that made the character memorable in Toy Story 2, but the performance has gained a new strain of worry. Jessie knows what it means to be left behind. Watching Bonnie choose the tablet does not feel like a new problem. It feels like an old wound returning in a different form.
The decision to center Jessie gives the fifth film an emotional perspective its premise needs. Woody's fear was always that a child would stop loving him. Jessie's fear is more specific. She worries that love can remain real and still become inaccessible. Bonnie does not reject the toys. She simply reaches for something easier.
A miscommunication brings Woody back to Bonnie's room, but Stanton resists allowing him to reclaim the story. Tom Hanks gives Woody a quieter presence than before, as someone who has discovered a life beyond belonging to one child and is not entirely sure what advice that makes him qualified to give. His return matters because Jessie no longer needs him to lead. She needs him to understand the kind of fear he once asked everyone else to trust him through.
Lilypad is frightening not because she wants to replace the toys, but because she does not have to want anything at all.
The film's funniest new character is Smarty Pants, a potty-training toy voiced by Conan O'Brien. He is equipped with a camera, tracking technology, and an unbearable enthusiasm for bodily functions. The joke is obvious, but O'Brien commits to the toy's need to make every humiliating event sound educational. Smarty Pants also fits the larger theme. Even the old-fashioned objects in Bonnie's world have become data collectors.
Some of that comedy pushes Toy Story 5 into broader territory than its predecessors, which may explain the series' first PG rating. The potty jokes are frequent, and Smarty Pants can feel like a short designed to keep interrupting the feature. Still, the character becomes more useful as the toys realize that technology is not a single enemy. It is already built into the objects expected to help raise a child.
Buzz receives a wonderfully strange subplot involving multiple Buzz Lightyears, allowing Tim Allen to revisit the character's programmed certainty from several directions at once. The sequence has the energy of Pixar animators being given permission to turn one familiar model into a small army of competing malfunctions. It is visually busy, but it also gives Buzz a rare chance to see his own rigidity multiplied around him.
The returning ensemble is handled better than in Toy Story 4, where many beloved characters were reduced to reactions. Rex, Hamm, Slinky, Forky, and the Potato Heads each receive at least one clear comic function. The film cannot deepen all of them in 102 minutes, but it remembers that Bonnie's room feels alive because every object has its own anxiety.
Pixar's animation continues to make the ordinary world appear enormous without losing the texture of small things. Lilypad's screen light changes the room, flattening colors and drawing Bonnie's face away from the warmer surfaces around her. The toys move through cables, charging stations, and digital accessories with the same physical ingenuity the series once applied to moving trucks and airport conveyors.
Randy Newman's score remains one of the franchise's most important forms of continuity. He uses familiar themes without making the film sound trapped in 1995. Taylor Swift's end-credit song, "I Knew It, I Knew You," was written for Jessie and approaches memory from a gentler direction than "When She Loved Me." It cannot reproduce the devastation of Sarah McLachlan's song, nor should it try. Its function is not abandonment. It is recognition.
The movie is less convincing whenever it turns its technology anxiety into a simple lesson. Children do not stop imagining because a tablet enters the room, and the toys' argument can occasionally sound like adults blaming an object for decisions made around it. The film becomes sharper when it treats Lilypad as part of Bonnie's loneliness rather than its cause.
Bonnie's social world matters more here than it did in the previous films. Her attachment to the tablet is connected to the difficulty of fitting in, finding friends, and understanding when play has become something other children might judge. That context saves the story from becoming a feature-length warning about screen time. The question is not whether toys are better than technology. It is whether either one can help a child reach another person.
Stanton has already ended this franchise beautifully once, and Toy Story 5 never completely escapes the suspicion that another return is unnecessary. The film knows it, too. Several jokes acknowledge the number in the title, while the emotional structure refuses to pretend that growing up can be defeated permanently. Another device will come. Another child will change. The toys cannot preserve a single version of play forever.
What they can do is adapt without mistaking adaptation for surrender. Jessie does not become Woody. She leads through her own history, recognizing Bonnie's distance because she remembers Emily's. The film gives her the story she has deserved for decades.
