“Toy Story 5” Won’t Leave Kids to Their Own Devices

Illustration by Tim Peacock Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story At the end of “Toy Story 4” (2019), Woody, the control-freak cowboy doll with the pull-string-activated voice of Tom Hanks, bade farewell to his friends and, like a sheep at last surrendering to his shepherdess, set off with Bo Peep for fresh adventures in the wild. I wasn’t sorry to see him go, and I couldn’t fathom why it had taken an entire movie to convince him that his most stubbornly held ideal—his belief in a deathless bond between kids and their toys—was sentimental to the point of dangerous narcissism. He had outgrown a child’s room, and the series in turn had outgrown him. But, if Woody couldn’t let go, the storytellers at Pixar clearly couldn’t, either, and their effort to keep the “Toy Story” films going smacked of similar desperation. Even the most memorable new character, Forky (Tony Hale)—an endearingly daffy piece of plastic cutlery with a tendency toward self-harm—could only reinforce the sense that we were being served a load of flimsy, disposable goods.

It’s no surprise that Woody cuts his retirement short and returns for a decent stretch of “Toy Story 5.” And if his reunion with his unerringly loyal space-ranger pal, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), feels a bit obligatory, the movie itself—directed by Andrew Stanton, who wrote the script with Kenna Harris, the co-director—represents an improvement on its predecessor, not least because it has a clear and creatively fertile reason for being. A couple of years have passed since the events of “Toy Story 4,” and Woody’s friends, led by Buzz and the sparky cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack), are still adored by their equally adorable owner, Bonnie (Scarlett Spears). But Bonnie, now a sensitive eight-year-old, is having trouble making friends, mainly because contemporary technology has transformed the very notion of child’s play. In one chilling early scene, the toys peek out Bonnie’s window and see all the houses around them lit up, from within, by the spectral glow of personal digital devices. The kids, entranced by their phones and tablets, don’t meet up anymore to play dress-up dolls, kick a ball around, or even just talk—not with whole virtual worlds and endless distractions at their eager little fingertips. Stanton, who, in the Pixar masterpiece “WALL-E” (2008), brilliantly mocked the sedentary, screen-addicted human gluttons of the future, has made a movie about the perils of present-day internet addiction.

Bonnie, at least, is still a fan of old-fashioned plastic-based and plushie toys, and the wondrous bursts of make-believe they can inspire—rendered here in vibrant, hallucinatory sequences with a watercolor-influenced style. But when her parents buy her a frog-themed tablet called Lilypad (Greta Lee), she, too, is glued to the screen in no time. Lily smirkily asserts her state-of-the-art superiority to the newly neglected Jessie, especially when it comes to improving Bonnie’s social life: within moments, she has virtually connected the girl to several other kids in the neighborhood. Lily can do just about everything a phone can do—send text messages and images, arrange package deliveries—and can do them without the authorization of Bonnie and her parents, making her far more powerful than past “Toy Story” antagonists such as Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear and Gabby Gabby. Those were embittered old-school toys, relics of the past who longed simply to be held and hugged. Lily is, ominously, a creature of the present and a harbinger of the future. In the ominous words of Woody, weighing in from the wilderness via two-way radio: “Toys are for play, but tech is for everything.”