Toy Story 5 Review: To Infinity, but Not Beyond

by Albert Pears

In 1995 a pull-string cowboy doll and a spaceman who didn’t know he was a toy went to infinity and beyond and dragged the whole art of the cartoon along with them. That first “Toy Story” was a palace coup got up as a children’s matinee—the moment a Bay Area computer outfit announced that the future of animation would be rendered, pixel by laborious pixel, on machines, and walked off with the whole industry while the audience was busy having the time of its life. Thirty-some years and four sequels later, the same plastic gang has been sent back into theatres to do what the studio that made them can no longer reliably do on its own: turn an idea into a feeling, and a feeling into a few hundred million dollars. And here is the joke—the rich, faintly melancholy joke at the center of “Toy Story 5″—that the most fully alive thing this studio has put on a screen in years is a movie about being superseded, made by the very people who are most terrified of being superseded themselves.

The premise has the old toy-box ache to it. Bonnie, the little girl who inherited Woody and Buzz and Jessie, can’t make friends; the other children have all migrated into their screens, and they don’t so much play together as glow together, side by side, never looking up, never looking at one another. So her parents, in that despairing modern way, buy her a remedy: a chirpy, frog-eyed tablet called Lilypad, all rounded corners and big pixel eyes, that promises to connect her to the world and instead seals her more tightly inside the bell jar—putting her in touch with other little girls who are themselves so hooked on the things that they’ve stopped looking at each other’s faces, too. It’s a neat, cruel inversion. The gadget sold as a cure for loneliness is the disease.

The whole saga has always pretended to be about the terror of being thrown away—of going obsolete, of ending up in the carton in the garage—but underneath, it has been about something older and more naked: the need to be seen. To be is to be perceived, Bishop Berkeley said of everything in the world, and it turns out to be doubly true in a nursery. A toy is alive only as long as a child is looking at it and loving it; and the unnerving suggestion this movie keeps circling is that the child is in exactly the same boat. If the kids don’t even turn toward one another anymore, what are they? Who is left to confirm that they exist? That’s a real subject, and for a good long stretch the picture has the nerve to feel it.

There’s a beautiful, almost eerie prologue: a cargo of next-generation Buzz Lightyears—sleeker models, a glowing screen where the old chest insignia used to be, able to function as a hotspot and, this time, actually to fly—washes up on a deserted island, and one by one they boot up, catch sight of a single star, and set off, in formation, to make contact with Star Command. They don’t know what they are; they’re hunting for a mission that will tell them. It’s the franchise’s most ancient gag—the toy who thinks he’s the genuine article—replayed now as something closer to a parable of consciousness switching on in the dark. And the gleaming new Buzzes keep tugging the old Space Ranger back toward the center of a film that, on paper, has politely retired him.

Because the surprise, and the best thing in the movie, is that this is finally Jessie’s picture. For the first time Woody and Buzz step back—Woody is off on a rescue run, going a little soft around the middle and, in the movie’s gentlest running joke, going visibly bald; Buzz is tangled in a romantic subplot that never quite locks into the main story—and the cowgirl is left holding the room, knighted by Woody as the new “sheriff,” the one the others look to. This is a shrewder choice than it first appears. Woody and Buzz were always somebody’s favorites; they belonged, they were Andy’s, and their whole drama was about staying loyal. Jessie has been handed down, outgrown, boxed up, and given away more than once—abandonment is built into her. We got a taste of it years ago, in that heartbreaking little flashback set to a song about a girl who grew up and stopped coming back, and here the movie returns to that old wound and presses on it. The fear that has run the saga—of being replaced, forgotten, loved and then not—has at last found the character it fits best. There’s something almost defiantly female about the whole construction: a little girl, her fumbling friendship with another little girl, and the cowgirl-mother-sheriff presiding over them, and the movie lets these relationships carry the weight without ever turning them into a slogan.

And then there is the look of the thing, which is—I have to hand it to them—ravishing in a perverse, show-offy way. These animators have always been able to make plastic and fur and dust look realer than real, but here they’ve gone further: they reproduce the flaws of obsolete machines, the photographic grain, the lens-flares, the little ovals of light sliding across the glass, the chromatic smear that bleeds along the edges of anything bright, the dead pixels swimming in Lilypad’s big amphibian eyes. The rope of Jessie’s hair, the cold metal on the hi-tech armor—everything has a texture you could almost rub between your fingers. Inside Bonnie’s play sequences the whole movie changes register, going soft and chalky and pastel, the way a child’s imagination redraws the world into something absurd and beautiful. I can’t think of another house with this much craft, this much patience, this much money lavished on the textures of decay—on making obsolescence gorgeous.

The voices are the warm, familiar furniture you’d want them to be. Hanks’s Woody still has that decent, faintly anxious catch in it; Tim Allen’s Buzz still plays the square with such bottomless conviction that you half love him for it; and Joan Cusack’s Jessie—all twang and tremor—has never had this much room to break your heart. Randy Newman is back, too, and in its big aching moments the score keeps reaching for the altitude of that balloon-borne heartbreak from a few films ago, the one about the old man and the hill, and it mostly gets there. The closing number, a Taylor Swift song that murmurs you out toward the post-credits tag, is pleasant and instantly forgettable; it hasn’t a trace of the lump-in-the-throat plainness of the friend-in-me tune that has been making children and their parents cry for thirty years. You feel the absence. A newer gadget, it turns out, doesn’t always do the old job better—which is, of course, this whole movie’s argument, smuggled into the end credits where it didn’t quite mean to put it.

Which is precisely what makes the cowardice of the last act so maddening. For an hour or so the movie shows you something it plainly knows is true and a little frightening—the isolation, the faces that no longer turn toward one another, the chasm between a child inventing a story with a stuffed rabbit and a child being managed by a glowing rectangle—and then it loses its nerve. It can’t bring itself to follow the thought all the way down. Instead it reaches for the ecumenical, everybody-wins solution: the old toys and the new gadget can live together, side by side, as though there were no real distance between a rag doll and a tablet—only a difference of firmware, a status update—as though the one didn’t quietly build a child’s imagination and language while the other quietly thins them out. To demonize the screen would have been hypocritical, sure, coming from a studio that built its empire on the newest machine in the room. But there’s a long way between demonizing a thing and waving through a cheap reconciliation, and the picture takes the easy exit.

The earlier films could afford their cruelty because the stakes were small and personal—in the very first one, all that hung in the balance was whether Woody would still be the favorite. Here the threat is total and democratic: every toy is disposable now, the whole category is being retired, and the prize for losing has changed. It used to be second place. Now it’s the box in the garage, and then nothing. There’s a chill of the present in that—of a world that orders its workers to annihilate themselves in their jobs right up until the next contraption arrives to replace them. The movie is unexpectedly grown-up about it. It fills its margins with the forgotten: toys rusting in the weeds of somebody’s yard; a doll’s tea party staged over and over for a child who is never, ever coming back; gadgets that used to be the future and are now junk—the standalone GPS, the clunky digital camera, the talking gizmo that once taught a toddler to use the potty, all of them long since swallowed whole by the phone in your pocket. That’s a real and adult sadness, the sadness of a technology that has outlived its use, and you can feel a tougher, sourer movie pushing to get out from under the merchandise.

But the studio won’t let it. The ending tidies everything up, sands off the bitterness, and arrives at the soothing notion that the instant connections of the screen just need to be “filled” with a passion for real things—have your tablet and your tea party, too. It doesn’t play. If the movie means to assure us that the screens haven’t really won, it’s lying to our faces; the grown-ups in the audience know better, and I suspect the kids do, too. And if it means to make a special case for Bonnie—one of the last children on earth who’d still rather hold a plastic cowgirl than a tablet—then it has quietly stopped being about the rest of us. You can’t have it both ways: either the war is real, in which case this peace treaty is a fantasy, or it isn’t, in which case why have I been crying?

What hangs over all of it, and what the movie can never quite say out loud, is that the studio is unmistakably talking about itself. Here is a company that was once the disruption—that put the hand-drawn cartoon out to pasture and built an empire on the new machine—now making a tender, panicky fable about old, beloved things being shoved aside by newer machines, even as its corporate parent pours money into the next wave of automation. The toys staring up at the cold blue glow of Lilypad and wondering whether anyone will ever play with them again are not subtle stand-ins for anything. No wonder the picture can’t bear to finish the thought; to finish it would be to admit something unbearable about its own mortality. You sense the same divided soul all through it—animators forever sprinting toward the future while clinging, viscerally, to the analog past they came up loving, the hand-built worlds and the warm, particular textures that no algorithm dreamed up first.

And yet—this is the lovable, exasperating thing—it works on you anyway. You laugh at Buzz, you ache for Jessie, you feel the old animated magic, the absurd and undimmed pleasure of watching toys snap to life and somehow matter, and you forgive the picture its hedging the way you forgive an old friend who can’t quite bring himself to say the hard thing at the table. It’s the best this studio has done in years, and it still pulls its punch—which may be the most honest thing about it. A movie about the dread of obsolescence that won’t dare to risk anything is, after all, a perfect little self-portrait of the institution that produced it: superb, full of heart, technically without rival, and just a shade too frightened to look you straight in the eye. To be is to be perceived. The toys want to be seen. So, you slowly realize, does Pixar—and it isn’t at all sure, anymore, that we’re still looking.