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For more than 30 years, Pixar’s signature Toy Story series has been entertaining children while giving voice to their parents’ anxieties. This is especially pronounced in the film’s sequels, as the living toys who dedicate their lives to the happiness of their owner/child experience all different sorts of potential and parent-paralleled obsolescence, from physical wear-and-tear and a child reaching young adulthood to the toy equivalent of empty-nesting (still hanging around the playroom but no longer anyone’s favourite). It’s only natural – maybe even a little belated – that Toy Story 5 would address the encroachment of technology, which continues to make its way to children earlier and earlier. So many years after the tech breakthroughs that allowed Toy Story to become the first computer-animated feature, and Pixar to become a household name in family entertainment, has the formerly Steve Jobs-owned company turned against the kind of innovation that built its success?
The movie arrives at a conspicuous juncture in the sometimes-uneasy relationship between humans, their children and their tech. According to Pew Research, the majority of kids under 12 are using tablets and/or smartphones, even as links between screen time and mental health difficulties continue to be studied. More school districts in the US are tightening rules on devices. Parenting in 2026 involves making a series of difficult, imperfect decisions about how to further regulate screen time. It’s only natural that Toy Story 5 would reflect this, even if it’s not entirely clear when the movie itself is taking place. (The human characters have clearly not aged seven full years since 2019’s Toy Story 4.)
For the non-human characters in the movie, tech – personified by a child-friendly “Lilypad” tablet nicknamed Lily – threatens to supplant their role as a child’s go-to plaything. This is a particularly traumatic experience for Jessie (Joan Cusack), the seemingly inanimate, secretly soulful favourite toy of eight-year-old Bonnie. Bonnie is lured in by Lily’s simple but transfixing games, and real-world parents are invited to share Jessie’s panic and dismay that children Bonnie’s age are more likely to stare at screens than imagine their own adventures to project upon the vessels of more traditional playthings. Of course, whatever its creative virtues, Toy Story 5 will also become content for those young eyes. After a run in theaters, it will be distributed on Disney+, a popular streaming app available on tablets everywhere.
Whether because of their tech roots or the trademark nuance they bring to these issues (most likely both), the film-makers behind Toy Story 5 haven’t created an anti-tech screed. One chunk of landfill-clogging capitalism-enabled plastic – nostalgic, adorable, cowgirl-shaped – is not necessarily positioned as morally superior to a more complicated yet also more practical configuration of the same non-biodegradable polymers. The differences (or lack thereof) are underlined when Jessie meets and eventually befriends some outdated devices who share her understandable neuroses about being discarded. What are these iterations of tech if not their own form of toys, ready for humans to project their own wants and needs on to them before facing eventual discarding?
Indeed, while the new tablet is shown to have a hypnotising, even deadening effect on Bonnie, its most nefarious emotional results are human-generated. Bonnie’s parents buy her a tablet because of its social utility; she is having trouble making friends, and not only do many children her age have tablets, it also functions as a nascent social media. It does not bring her on to an open internet full of randos and creeps and their horrible posts (which is a whole other set of dangers the movie does not get into), but the film does depict it as a medium ready-made for bullying, even if a user’s group chat is limited to other children from their dance class. At the same time, tech does play a role in a complicated effort to make Bonnie a more compatible IRL friend, even if their bond pointedly involves continuing imaginary and toy-based play, rather than everyone sequestering themselves on their respective devices, as seen during an ill-fated sleepover earlier in the film.
This is all thoughtful and fair-minded; anyone expecting the middle-aged Pixar brain trust to produce an addled grownup screed against children and their damn tech – while extolling the virtues of their beloved fake plastic icons of yesteryear – will be pleasantly surprised. Pleasant surprises are typical of the Pixar storytelling style – grab the viewers with a great hook (the toys versus their new nemesis, the screens) and then deepen the story they thought they were getting until it is about something else (the positive impact parents hope to make on their children’s lives, even when it may be fleeting). That was true, too, of Pixar’s previous film Hoppers, from earlier this year. It starts off about a teenage girl’s attempts to save a local pond ecosystem, and winds up as a race to prevent all-out war between animals and humanity.
The problem with this approach of late – especially in Hoppers but also present in Toy Story 5 – is that these nuances start to feel mathematically, rather than emotionally, derived. Pixar film-makers are directors and writers and designers, yes, but there’s also an engineering side to their work that seems to love the big swings of inventive technology while resisting same-scaled gestures for their characters. Hence Jessie can’t rebel too hard against tech (or at least cannot have that rebellion fully validated), and Mabel, the budding activist from Hoppers, must remain in a friendly tug-of-war with developers and local politicians, rather than fully rebuking them. Some of these story turns play less like acts of radical empathy than a form of pointy-headed both-sides-ing.
To a degree, these are just the basic building blocks of good mainstream drama – unlikely allegiances, lead characters whose assumptions are challenged, seeming villains who gain nuance with further exploration. But it is precisely the would-be value-neutral conditions of modern tech that makes it so insidious in a child’s hands. To make the addictive quality of bad touchscreen games secondary to havoc wreaked by bad friends, especially when that havoc is entirely enabled by tech, seems like an optimistic view, especially in an era where deepfakes lead to disinformation and AI exhausts water supplies because tech guys insist the tech requires immediate acquiescence from humanity.
Toy Story 5 isn’t exactly suffused with move-fast-and-break-things tech-bro cheerleading. The film wittily acknowledges both the haplessness of many parenting decisions – Bonnie’s parents admit that getting their child a tablet may be a bad idea, and essentially offer their own shruggy emoticon, unsure of what else to try – and the fact that screen fixations know no demographic limitations. (At one point, there is an offhand gag about a grown adult spending minutes on end fussing with his virtual-meeting backgrounds, amusing himself and likely no one else.) In that sense, it’s true to modern parenting: I regret letting my child look at YouTube too early, and I also look at my phone too often. We do what we can to mitigate these hard-to-erase bad decisions and move forward.
Yet, on a bigger-picture level, there is not much satisfaction in a movie about how tech does not have to be that dangerous, and can even be pretty endearing, just so long as parents are just the right combination of ambivalent, flawed and oblivious, yet emotionally available in others. The movie seems to sense this discomfort: its big emotional wallop doesn’t have much to do with tech, but rather the same insecurities Jessie has felt since Toy Story 2. The tech may change, the movie implies, but the fundamentals of guiding a child and imprinting your best moments into their memories remains universal.
That may be wishful thinking. Part of the nefariousness of tech is the way it introduces new guiding forces into a child’s life, unbidden and often unqualified. It may not be the purview of Toy Story 5 (or Toy Story 6) to tell a story about Bonnie taking advice from YouTubers spewing nonsense, or training herself away from reading and toward short-form video, or relying on chatbots to perform simple tests incorrectly. But as much as Pixar acknowledges that toys may not have a future, their faith in the partnership between humans and tech may belong in the past.
