Toys are Forever
the 30-year-old Toy Story franchise reboots for the digital age it helped kick off.
Toy Story 5
Director: Andrew Stanton • Writers: Andrew Stanton, Kenna Harris
Starring [English]: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Greta Lee, Conan O’Brien
USA • 1hr 42mins
Opens Hong Kong June 25 • I
Grade: B
After writing four entries of the Toy Story franchise and contributing to Pixar’s reputational and financial (US$3.6 billion in ticket sales and, obviously now, counting) success, Andrew Stanton gets a crack at directing one of them, at first blush seemingly the second least necessary entry in the series after 2019’s Toy Story 4. Stanton has a long list of directing credits, many of them live action – the nearly perfect Wall·E, John Carter (which really isn’t as bad as everyone thinks it was), a few episodes of For All Mankind – but Toy Story is Pixar’s defining title, and Toy Story 5 is a demonstration of Disney’s defining stockholder forward MO. This is a match made in heaven and Stanton is long overdue to play in this sandbox.
And sure, TS5 is also totally unnecessary and does little for the core story but like TS4 it genuinely has its moments as it hurtles towards transformation into a second iteration of Inside Out. Is the posse of toys we’ve come to know and love (by most, though full disclosure Toy Story has always been a take-it or leave-it proposition for me) in danger of being rendered obsolete, not by age this time but by technological progress? Why yes, yes they are. Is the posse going to venture beyond the play room of a toddler/elementary school kid to reclaim its place in said kid’s heart? Why yes, yes it is. Do we care? If you have an eight-year-old who you’d like to convince storytelling comes in formats larger than 5” x 8” and longer than 35 seconds yes, yes we do. Toy Story 5 tackles the elephant in the room – the screen – with a sympathetic eye and boldly suggests that analogue and digital can co-exist in a kid’s life. Hardly a hot take but at least the film floats the idea. Can’t get too crazy after all. What if kids turn off the screens and we don’t need as many Disney+ subscriptions? Shudder.
The demon tech
It’s been some time since Woody (Tom Hanks) embarked on his last adventure with the gang to save their new kid Bonnie’s (Scarlett Spears) home made toy Forky (Tony Hale) from the trash bin. Woody reunited with Bo Peep on the Island of Misfit Toys, leaving Bonnie’s crew in Jessie’s (Joan Cusack) charge, with Buzz (Tim Allen) as her evidently enamoured deputy. Bonnie can’t make friends and her parents think maybe it’s because they’re holding her back from too much screen time: no phone, no tablet, no laptop. So they get her a child-focused Lilypad, and the all-powerful, overwhelming Lily (Greta Lee) enters the conversation. Of course Bonnie runs into all manner of digital name-calling and bullying and pressures to get likes and so on, which messes with her head – and leads her to blowing it when she gets a chance to make a real connection with another girl her age, Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris). So it’s Jessie and some of Blaze’s own cast-offs, Smarty Pants (Conan O’Brien), Snappy (Shelby Rabara) and Atlas (Craig Robinson) to the rescue.
This is the A-plot, the existential crises and struggle to find the courage to march to your own drum that have always been the backbone of the series. Is Bonnie particularly interesting? Not really, but plenty of kids will no doubt recognise their own insecurities in her. Do Stanton and co-writer Kenna Harris hit most of the same notes played in TS-TS4? They do indeed, but the kids who saw TS4 are 15 now and may not need the reassurance or have other fish to fry.
The B-plot is where the fun is, perhaps not co-incidentally when we’re forced to listen to Allen only in tiny bits. On a nearby desert island, a cargo container loaded with upgraded, drone-ready Buzz Lightyears crashes and somehow switches into demo mode. Coming to life, 50-odd Buzzes set out on a mission to find Star Command and I promise you, I would pay money to see a 90-minute movie of commando Buzzes navigating the woods and highways of, what, southern California and battling campers, big rigs and farm animals. The Buzz Army segments give you hope that maybe Pixar isn’t as creatively bankrupt as its parent.
The Buzz Army and the main story are swaddled in typically solid Pixar artwork that set the CGI 3D bar for everything that followed, and so by default it no longer truly stands out. In fairness Stanton and Harris stuck to the little details that continue the expand the saga – chief among them Woody’s bald spot and a shift to focus on Cusack’s Jessie and the other newcomers, as if Toy Story 6 may be ready to let Hanks and Allen pass the torch to a next generation. O’Brien and Robinson deliver some of the best jokes effortlessly, and the idea that sitting in the same room with a tablet isn’t the same thing as sitting in the same room and actively engaging is hardly scandalous, but if anyone can soft peddle the idea of putting the phone down for a hot minute, it’s probably Toy Story. Unless the screen has Disney+ on it. Then you can totally watch.