’s review of Pixar Toy Story 5 finds a new threat inside the toys’ world: Lilypad, a sinister tablet that turns Bonnie’s attention away from the old gang and into a screen-driven pull that the film cannot fully control. What starts as a neat modern update to the franchise’s fear of being outgrown ends up, in the review’s view, as a story that flinches when it should press harder.
That matters now because Toy Story 5 is not just another sequel; it is the fifth episode in a franchise built on the private panic that children stop needing their toys. The review says the film is slick and smooth, but also that its big tech warning lands at a moment when addictive devices are already swallowing the imaginative play that honest-to-goodness toys once ruled. Bonnie, voiced by Scarlett Spears, gets a Lilypad and is first thrilled by how it connects her with other girls, which makes the later turn into cruelty and online bullying sting more sharply.
The returning voices give the movie its familiar weight. Tim Allen is back as Buzz Lightyear, Tom Hanks as Woody, Joan Cusack as Jessie, Annie Potts as Bo Peep, and Conan O’Brien as Smarty Pants, with Mykal-Michelle Harris playing Blaze. Jessie’s thread also reaches back to TS2, where When She Loved Me defined her heartbreak, and the review says that emotional note is recalled here as Jessie meets Blaze, a kid on a farm who could be a perfect best friend for Bonnie. The film even folds in a Taylor Swift song, another sign that Pixar Toy Story 5 is reaching for present-day feeling while trying to keep one foot in the old toy box.
That balance is where the movie slips. Lilypad begins as the kind of polished digital villain the story seems ready to condemn, but the review says the device eventually bends toward sentimental self-sacrifice, softening the edge of the idea it was meant to sharpen. Woody’s side of the film pushes in a different direction, with him living in a feral outdoor existence away from human control alongside Bo Peep, complete with a bald patch and a growing paunch, yet even that rougher strand does not rescue the central moral battle from feeling compromised. A rogue platoon of upgraded Buzzes helps sort out one plot complication, but the bigger issue is harder to fix: the review says the film’s jeopardy, novelty, ideas and passion are all lacking.
So Pixar Toy Story 5 ends up as a movie about a very current fear that never fully commits to its own worst-case scenario. It shows what happens when toys meet the screen age and then backs away from the full cost of that collision, leaving Bonnie, Jessie, Buzz and Woody in a story that knows exactly what it wants to warn about and then decides, too late, to be gentler than the warning deserves.
