Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Toy Story 5’ on Disney+, the Continually Endearing Saga of Sentient Toys’ Tearjerking Existential Crises

Welp, Toy Story 5 (now on Disney+) revisits the most emotionally wrenching scene from the entire Toy Story franchise. No, not that one. Or the other one. Or the other other one. Right: THAT one. Which means cowgirl Jessie, voiced by Joan Cusack, takes the lead in this new adventure in anthropomorphism from Pixar, who happily gorged on its $1.1 billion in worldwide ticket sales (after Disney dropped a cool $250 million to make it). At this point in the series, one thing is clear – it isn’t a matter of if a movie will make you cry, but how much. 

TOY STORY 5: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: We open on a shipwrecked and cracked-open shipping container, thus establishing Chekhov’s Legion of Newfangled Wifi-Connected Buzz Lightyears (Tim Allen). When will they truly become relevant to the plot? When it needs them, of course, but in the meantime, it’s okay to laugh at the gags. Cut to: Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the girl who now plays with Jessie, her loyal steed Bullseye, the OG Buzz — who gets a subplot in which he summons up the courage to propose marriage to Jessie — and their collective of plaything pals. Bonnie doesn’t have many friends, perhaps because her parents haven’t relented and given her an iPad yet. EVERYONE ELSE HAS ONE, Y’KNOW. And Mom and Dad cave. Enter Lilypad (Greta Lee), the device that zombificates children and inspires them to remain immobilized in rooms filled with the distinctive glow of — eek — Screen Time.

This is horrorshow city for the toys, of course, yet another existential crisis for them to face. But they’re experts at those by now. And as Bonnie gets sucked into the delightful world of physical stagnancy and cyberbullying, Jessie’s ready to get in the octagon with Lilypad and put her in an armbar, if she had arms. From here, the plot blasts off with Bonnie’s depressing IRL sleepover with her new friends, initiating a series of events that renders Jessie and Bullseye lost on the very property where she was once abandoned — and where horse aficionado Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) now lives with her collection of Chekhov’s Horse Figurines. And as we gasp at the thought of our dear cowgirl’s retraumatization, Woody (Tom Hanks) drops in to help Buzz find Jessie, while she uneasily gets help from an electronic toilet-training toy voiced by Conan O’Brien. Will the rescue attempt dovetail with Bonnie’s need for a true friend instead of the mean girls in the chat app? Inevitably.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? This feels like a direct sequel to Toy Story 2, crossed with an anti-technology movie like, I dunno, Videodrome? Yeah! Videodrome!

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: What about “Conan O’Brien as a toilet-training toy” did you not comprehend?

Our Take: Toy Story 5 boasts some screenplay issues, some of which involve the insertion of a sadly extraneous Woody into the plot purely out of obligation, a bit of headscratching over the smitten-Buzz stuff and the unleashing of neo-Buzzes purely as plot devices. It all feels like padding for the core story about Jessie coming to terms with her role in Bonnie’s life — or of a toy in any kid’s, for that matter. That Jessie reaches some closure regarding her Sarah McLachlan-soundtracked heart-crushing abandonment feels thematically out of step in a movie franchise that to this point was happy to philosophize about some of the unanswerable existential questions about existence in general. But hey, at least the movie’s frequently hilarious.

The big dumb obvious theme here addresses the prevailing notion that Screen Time is an unholy abomination that needs to be obliterated for the sake of our children’s brain health. And so we get the symbolic clash between a 1950s-coded cowgirl ragdoll and a newfangled plastic everything-tech device — and what will be to some a disappointing complication of simplistic protagonist-antagonist dynamics. In truth, Toy Story 5 posits prejudice against anthropomorphic tech toys as toxic, and is ultimately more interested in the logical — and ultimately smart —- assertion that technology is only as bad as the individual wielding it. And as usual, beneath all of it is the traditional Toy Story reminder that the relentless passage of time will steamroller us all. It’s a good thing you can just stick your device in a bowl of rice after you soak it with tears.

Our Call: Toy Story 5 might be the most structurally ramshackle, and therefore the least of the franchise so far. But it’s nonetheless as charming, sweet and funny as ever. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.