![\"Toy](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/toy-story-5-2.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
The challenge the toys face now, as director and writer Andrew Stanton and co-director and co-screenwriter Kenna Harris make clear, is existential. Screen-time threatens to conquer all: it not only monopolises time that would have been spent with physical amusements but could displace imaginative play entirely in favour of structured games. Even the gang\u2019s owner, Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), is not immune to its lure when she gets a new Lilypad tablet, voiced by Greta Lee.<\/p>\n
This interloper is confident in her ability to connect Bonnie with new friends that the lonely girl desperately needs. Jessie (Joan Cusack), who now leads the gang after Woody (Tom Hanks) went off to rescue abandoned toys in the last film, is unconvinced. Wary of this high-tech invader \u2014 like Woody before her \u2014 she forms her own plans for Bonnie. Alas, Jessie\u2019s attempts to help leave her separated from her crew and forced to confront her own fear of abandonment, while Buzz (Tim Allen) and the rest set out to get her back.<\/p>\n
Funny and charming on a level with the first three films.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that should be Buzzes: in the film\u2019s most entertaining subplot, a literal raft of brand-new Buzz Lightyear toys are washed overboard from a container ship and set out to reach \u201cSpace Command\u201d and civilisation (the in-universe franchise seems to be doing better than Lightyear<\/a>). Their adventures are, for much of the film, an unconnected counterpoint to the main tale, but they offer an outsized share of the humour. Other new elements include the abandoned toys Jessie meets, led by Conan O\u2019Brien\u2019s \u2018Smarty Pants\u2019, a potty-training tech device shaped like a toilet roll that should delight the more scatalogically minded members of the audience.<\/p>\n The film\u2019s lead, however, is Jessie, finally taking over from the Woody and Buzz double-act. Cusack\u2019s character has been a reliable sidekick across three films, but this story delves back into that \u2018When She Loved Me\u2019-scored montage in Toy Story 2<\/a> that explained the loss of her original owner and the lingering trauma she suffered as a result. There wasn\u2019t a dry eye in the house for that, and Randy Newman\u2019s score here dips regularly back into the melody of that Sarah McLachlan tearjerker to really tug the heartstrings as Jessie panics about this latest rejection.<\/p>\n You could read an element of \u2018old man yells at cloud\u2019 in the studio\u2019s depiction of a nightmare world where everyone is on their screen all the time and thereby prevented from interacting with one another. Of course, they\u2019re not wrong in identifying tech as a cause of human loneliness and a sap to creativity. What\u2019s more surprising is that they ultimately come to a deeply moderate conclusion. Screen time can, it says, be helpful as part of a balanced leisure diet, which is something any conscientious parent could have told them in the first place.<\/p>\n It\u2019s remarkably mild given the studio has historically argued quite fiercely for the power and indeed primacy of human creativity in story after story, though perhaps less surprising when you consider that they share a founder with Apple and a home with the tech world in the Bay Area. Their conclusion is reasonable and commonsensical, with only an edge of starry-eyed optimism, but you have to look very hard to spot the radical edge and simmering anger of WALL\u2022E<\/a> or The Incredibles<\/a> under this last act. Perhaps it\u2019s in the throwaway comment about the life expectancy of tech toys, or in the way that this retroactively gives more force to the last film. Reading between the lines, an entire generation of toys will soon need the rescue service run by Woody and Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves, fifth-from-last billed) \u2014 and that\u2019s a gloomy thought. But in the meantime, one little girl and her cowgirl doll find a path through, and we can all take comfort from that.<\/p>\n It\u2019s funny and charming on a level with the first three films, even if it pulls a couple of punches. Pixar\u2019s not just toying with these characters \u2014 they take play very seriously indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The old toys face a new, high-tech competitor: a tablet called Lilypad (Greta Lee), that threatens to displace…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-641991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}