You can always count on the Toy Story films to provide the cuddly coziness of a familiar premise. In each one, a kid’s favorite toy is faced with obsolescence, either because the kid is growing up or is drawn to the allure of a new plaything. There’s always an odyssey, with the toy being separated from its owner and having to find its way back home, and a moment or two that gets you all misty-eyed out of nowhere, all leading up to a bittersweet ending about how precious and fleeting childhood is.
Toy Story 5 doesn’t stray from the formula that has worked four times before, but it’s the first of the series to focus on broader changes in the real world. This time, the threat to Woody, Buzz and company is tech, gadgets with touch screens and wi-fi that are marketed to kids. If the existential dilemma of the earlier Toy Stories was encroaching adolescence, here it’s technology that has inspired actual think pieces, legislation and psychological studies. With dolls, action figures and Potato Heads, you have to use your imagination. Now the toys do the imagining for you.
With an intriguing premise like that, and with WALL-E director Andrew Stanton on board, you might think Pixar would push the franchise in the strange, bold directions of its best work. But Toy Story 5 doesn’t really color outside the lines, and it really only uses the specter of tech — in this case, a kids’ gaming tablet called Lilypad — the same way the first film used Buzz Lightyear: It’s a shiny new agent of chaos that will, by the time Toy Story 6 rolls around, itself be overshadowed by something more advanced.
One of the only real surprises here is that Jessie the cowgirl (again voiced by Joan Cusack) is the main character. Her owner Bonnie, who inherited Andy’s toys at the end of Toy Story 3, doesn’t fit in. She still plays with “real” toys while the other kids in the neighborhood are glued to devices. So her parents buy her a Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee), and its capabilities are terrifying to the analog toys.
There are some clever, whimsical touches in Toy Story 5, including an army of new-tech Buzz Lightyears (all voiced by Tim Allen) that escape from a shipping container, and Woody (Tom Hanks), sagging and fading in his old age, spending his retirement rescuing toys that have been abandoned by device-obsessed kids.
But mostly, Toy Story 5 is determined to be a bright, well-paced entertainment, and it offers the classic Pixar mix of high-energy action for kids and wink-wink-nudge-nudge jokes for adults. The franchise itself is now the old plaything that gets pulled out of the toy box every few years. The first film was released three decades ago, and now these characters have been passed down through at least two generations. If Pixar ever gets around to a sixth movie, I hope they upgrade the story itself to a new model.
Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.