In the modern entertainment age, franchising for the sake of it has become entirely commonplace. So long as intellectual properties are financially successful and capable of regularly turning a profit, no franchise is ever truly finished. Strangely enough, over the past decade, this has become especially true even in the medium of animation. Where sequels to animated films used to be predominantly relegated to straight-to-DVD releases and bargain bins at discount stores, they are now the bread and butter of the industry.

I say all of this to say that it’s easy to get jaded and uber-cynical when you see a title like “Toy Story 5” preparing for release. However, what’s so wonderful about Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris’ long-gestating sequel is that it’s about as far from an easy cash grab as humanly possible. Instead, this fourth sequel to Pixar’s seminal original launching pad of a film overtly embraces several of the themes and subtextual threads that have emerged organically throughout the series, recontextualizing the three-decade-long-running franchise of cinematic bangers in a way I had never really thought about before: modern mythology.

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TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT “TOY STORY 5”

5. The Dynamic Duo of Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris

Toy Story 5 is written and directed by the duo of Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris. Stanton is a longtime Pixar veteran, a creative who has a writing credit on the first Toy Story and who also directed films like Finding Nemo and the masterpiece that is WALL-E. Harris, meanwhile, is a newer voice within Pixar, having made their directorial debut on the Luca-adjacent short film Ciao Alberto. In this combination of old and new, Toy Story 5 is able to strike a balance that is both traditional and innovative.

The film is both ruthlessly focused and astoundingly audacious. The first act spends time juggling multiple story threads, all of which inevitably collide in the latter half of the film. However, the fact that Stanton and Harris have crafted a structure that allows for these big, ambitious narrative swings while still remaining firmly rooted in the distinct perspective of Jessie as a character is nothing short of mesmerizing. Toy Story 5 is very much a film that could have simply played the hits and raked in the cash, but Stanton and Harris’ combined work, alongside their collaborators at Pixar, results in something far more nuanced, articulate, and affecting.

4. The Music

Randy Newman has long been the stalwart of the Toy Story franchise, writing original songs for all of the films and orchestrating the entire musical scores for them as well. That remains predominantly the case in this fifth entry, though he does receive a musical assist from Taylor Swift as well, with her bespoke end credits song, “I Knew It, I Knew You.”

The song is killer (and that is coming from someone who was kind of dreading new Swift music after the debacle that was The Life of a Showgirl), and Newman’s score is fantastic. The venerated musician finds inspiration anew in key elements of the plot, such as the legion of marooned high-tech Buzz Lightyear toys, who get their own operatic vocal arrangements to underscore their scenes. Elsewhere, Newman digs even deeper into the roots of his earlier inspirations, most notably with Jessie as a character, who receives a stronger twang in her theme music, along with numerous symphonic renditions of the iconic “When She Loved Me” from Toy Story 2. All in all, it’s phenomenal music across the board, worth hearing on the best sound system you can get.

3. The Playtime Setpieces

The masterpiece that is Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3 opens with one of my favorite sequences from any Toy Story film: a playtime sequence that sees the animators bringing young Andy’s imagination to cinematic life in thrilling fashion. It’s exciting, hysterical, and altogether enthralling. In Toy Story 5, with the toys and the films as a whole having shifted over to Bonnie, she gets numerous instances of her own playtime set pieces, and they are all just as fantastic.

Incorporating an entirely new animation style and aesthetic, these sequences bring the imaginations of these young girls (newcomer Blaze gets a playtime set piece as well) to life in the same way that the third film brought Andy’s to life. These sequences are full of innovation and bursting with creativity, while also gaining an immense amount of traction from contrasting themselves with the playtime sequences from earlier in the franchise. They are thrilling, insightful, and enlightening all at once, more than worth the price of admission.

2. The Performances

There are so many fantastic vocal performances throughout Toy Story 5. Tim Allen is as reliably broad as ever as Buzz, but it’s the other two-thirds of the main trio here that really get to shine in unexpected ways. First up is Joan Cusack as Jessie, who gets to be this film’s full-on protagonist and absolutely rises to the occasion. Jessie has long been a rich character, but seeing her get more room to breathe is a bona fide treat, and Cusack delivers her greatest vocal performance of the series as a result.

Then there is Tom Hanks as Woody, who absolutely soars as a result of the exact opposite approach: he’s unencumbered by the narrative and instead freed up to go kind of bonkers. In installments past, Woody has often been relegated to the role of the comedic straight man in one way or another. But here, Woody is unleashed, and Hanks subsequently goes completely off the rails. This is the most scenery he has ever chewed in one of these movies, hamming it up with several line deliveries in absolutely gut-busting ways.

Also, the scene-stealer of the movie is Conan O’Brien as Smarty Pants, a tech-based toilet aid. Conan goes full-blown gonzo in the ways that only Conan can, while also delving into some unanticipated nuance and pathos. All around, miraculous stuff.

1. What They Grow Beyond

The central narrative hook of Toy Story 5 is “tech versus toys.” There are about a million different ways this could have gone horribly wrong, and yet Stanton, Harris, and the team manage to pull it off with aplomb. The film is ultimately about the ways childhood has changed over the course of the franchise’s run: how technology has infiltrated this once-idyllic daydream of playtime and the implications of outsourcing childhood imagination to a series of devices.

On top of this, the franchise’s treatment of its characters remains consistent and earnestly authentic as ever. The way the Toy Story films continue to function as “yes, and” storytelling, building off each installment in ways that feel organic and deeply satisfying, is astounding. I don’t want to spoil some of this film’s greatest moments, but suffice it to say it engages meaningfully with its past while also charting a new course forward.

Where the previous two installments each brought things toward a sense of closure for the series as a whole, Toy Story 5 distinctly does not. Instead, it recontextualizes the franchise and redefines what a Toy Story film can be in the process.

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GRADE

(A-)

Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris’ Toy Story 5 is a Pixar film that more than lives up to the studio and franchise’s reputation. In an entertainment ecosystem full of seemingly unyielding franchises that keep proliferating for the sole sake of producing more monetizable content, Toy Story 5 stands in stark contrast as a passion-filled artistic statement. It is almost certainly not the sequel many Toy Story fans want, but it is instead the one they need: a film about the intrinsic beauty of growing, to infinity and beyond.

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