The spirit of Samuel Beckett is alive and well in what will surely — and most deservedly — be the biggest family movie of the year. Beautifully rendered and tightly scripted, it’s a very modern comedy that hits almost all its satirical targets. And yet it does all this with a deep strain of melancholy that rivals even the bleakest misery-fest at Cannes this year, with Jessie the cowgirl facing abandonment for the third and maybe last time as she hits middle age. “I can’t do this — I can’t love another kid just to find out I never mattered,” she blurts out in a line as bleak as anything in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
One of the few franchise movies trusted enough not to bother with a sub-heading, Toy Story 5 bypasses most of the events of Toy Story 4 to return to the metaphysical themes explored in parts 1-3: What is a toy? What is “play”? And if nobody is playing with toy, can it even be said to exist? Lesser conundrums have sent many to the crackpipe, and it’s to director Andrew Stanton’s credit that while his film caters for younger audiences by emphasizing the need for a lower-fi me-time childhood, it also addresses far more adult concerns, offering a bittersweet balm for concerned parents (and certainly grandparents) who may find themselves facing redundancy in the imminent AI revolution.
Correctly intuiting that the bickering bromance between Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) is somewhat played out now after 30 years, Stanton puts Jessie (Joan Cusack) center stage this time. It’s a bold gambit, since cowgirl dolls weren’t even much of a thing when she debuted in Toy Story 2, which might explain why it’s off-set by a parallel plot in which boxloads of Buzz Lightyears awaken simultaneously after being marooned on a desert island and join together to make a rendezvous with Star Command.
As they pursue what at first seems to be an entirely pointless mission, the scene shifts to the home of Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the little girl who now owns Jessie and Buzz (Woody having dropped out after Toy Story 4 to pursue community misfit-toy outreach). Bonnie is desperate to play with the Jordan twins over the road, but they run indoors when she tries to befriend them. Jessie goes to investigate and finds the two kids slumped over their tablets “doing nothing”. A chorus of discarded playthings tell her mournfully that “the age of toys is over”, one displaying signs of PTSD (“The tapping! The TAPPING!”).
Sensing that their daughter is becoming a loner, Bonnie’s parents buy her a Lilypad (Greta Lee), a computer for kids with its own social network. Bonnie forgets her toys almost instantly and is overjoyed when Lilypad adds her to a group chat for the girls in her dance class. One of them invites Bonnie over for a sleepover, and Jessie sneaks into her overnight bag, not realizing that toys are verboten to the new generation. This puts in motion a chain of events that will see Jessie returned to her old farmhouse in the countryside, now inhabited by a girl about Bonnie’s age — Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) — and her parents.
The scene is set for another frantic find-and-rescue mission that brings Woody out of retirement and cleverly integrates the story of the itinerant Buzz Lightyears. With the aid of Blaze’s out-of-date tech 1.0 toys — a camera called Snappy, a satnav called Atlas and an electronic toilet-trainer called Smarty Pants, a horribly unfunny addition more irritating than the last film’s Forky — Jessie is able to use the internet to flag her whereabouts. Yes, it’s a rinse-and-repeat of the usual formula, but the digital-age backdrop adds an intriguing dimension; Stanton and Kenna Harris’s script doesn’t treat tech as the enemy but, like the rest of the toys, just one more thing that’s subject to time and obsolescence.
While the primary objective of the storyline would seem to be to reunite Jessie with Bonnie, the real aim of the filmmakers is to bring together Bonnie and Blaze, two grounded pre-adolescent girls between 8 and 9 with a lot in common. The message — “Find your tribe!” — is a much-needed and frankly refreshing diversion from Jessie’s soon-to-be-exhausting existential crisis (a trope that surely hit its apogee in Toy Story 3’s genuinely alarming furnace scene) and proves a constructive way to approach the theme of cyber-bullying, which is tactfully handled and yet all the more powerful for its understatement.
Not many franchises have the legs to get to three films let alone five, and part of the latest iteration’s success is down to fact that that it pulls back from the nostalgia of the first two — “Ooh, an Etch-A-Sketch!” “Ooh, a Slinky!” — because, let’s be honest, nobody under 60 really cares about the likes of Mr. Potato Head* anymore, an increasingly cavernous generation gap that is addressed by a literal wink in a very camp cameo from a My Little Pony. (Besides, who’s even noticed that they’ve started making them up themselves now, with Duke Caboom and now Pizza with Sunglasses, voiced, if that’s the right word, by Bad Bunny.)
Instead, Stanton’s film is a fun, thoughtful, multi-generational family film based on a well-written script that genuinely tries to say something new while staying faithful to a well-worn premise. In that sense, given that it holds up much better than the last one, it feels like this would be a good place to bow out — but then, people said that about Toy Story 3 and look where we are now. A post-credits sting teases the return of Emperor Zurg, and yet, amazingly, it doesn’t feel tired. Strange but true; there could be a little more life in this old warhorse yet.
*Mr. Potato Head can also use fruit.
Title: Toy Story 5
Director: Andrew Stanton
Screenwriter: Andrew Stanton, Kenna Harris
Voice cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Conan O’Brien, Scarlett Spears, Greta Lee, Shelby Rabara, Mykal-Michelle Harris
Distributor: Disney/Pixar
Running time: 1 hr 42 mins
English (US) ·