Our Toys, Our Selves: ‘Toy Story 5’ Grows Up With Its Audience

When the original “Toy Story” was announced in 1995, the film’s status as the first computer-animated theatrical feature was merely the most marketable of its multiple selling points. There were other reasons to be excited. Pixar, not yet owned by Disney, had gone to the trouble of acquiring the rights to include legacy brand name toys like Mr. Potato Head and Slinky. Furthermore, there was a remarkable cast of A-list talent providing voices, including TV and film stars like Tim Allen and Annie Potts, as well as comics and character actors including Joan Cusack, Wallace Shawn, and the late Don Rickles and Jim Varney. The big prize was, obviously, Tom Hanks, fresh from winning two Oscars in a row, perhaps marking the first time an Academy Award-winning actor had appeared in a cartoon.Thirty years and five “Toy Stories” later, the cultural landscape has completely changed. For one thing, virtually every element of the “Toy Story” mix has become subsumed to the success of the franchise. Mr. Potato Head and Slinky Dog are now best known as “Toy Story” characters and Rickles and Varney are best remembered for their roles in “Toy Story.” Even the mighty Mr. Allen, then a top box office draw, is now mainly known as Buzz Lightyear despite a recent TV reboot of his “Santa Claus” franchise. Today, the only toy with an offscreen name bigger than this franchise is the redoubtable Mr. Hanks.And yes, computer-generated animation has become the norm. Traditional hand-drawn cartoons are now delightfully retro, when they’re produced at all. The preponderance of digital media — with people glued to their screens and interacting with them rather than other human beings — has become such a trope that it has even turned up in what might be the very last place I expected to find it: the plot of “Toy Story 5.”That is indeed what drives the fifth episode of the franchise: the central kid, Bonnie, receives her first “device,” a kind of kid-friendly tablet, and immediately decides she’d rather play with it than her physical toys like the cowgirl Jessie and Buzz Lightyear. For Disney and Pixar to be making such a statement is remarkable: their whole enterprise is driven by tech, and devoted to providing content for all those screens that Bonnie and the other children here are apparently attached to — in the words of the great Sheridan Whiteside in “The Man Who Came to Dinner” — with an umbilical cord made of piano wire.Buzz Lightyear and Woody in ‘Toy Story 5.’ DisneyNumber five is a worthy extension of the brand, even if it doesn’t pack quite the wallop — the laughs and the heart — of the previous offering. “Toy Story 4” (2019) gave us the beloved Christina Hendricks as Gabby Gabby, the scariest and most sympathetic villain in the whole series. The sole aspect of the fifth film that’s significantly weaker than its predecessors is the music; Taylor Swift’s song “I Knew It, I Knew You,” is nowhere near as memorable as Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” and “When She Loved Me.” My only other disappointment is that screenwriters Andrew Stanton, who also directed, and Kenna Harris weren’t able to come up with a meaningful role in the action for Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as Ducky and Bunny, whose generic character names stand in stark contrast to the immense charm which empowered them to steal “Toy Story 4” from the established cast. Maybe it’s a stretch to describe “Toy Story 5” as Disney’s critique of its own business model. In the end, the digital toys and the traditional physical ones find ways of working together to keep children entertained and educated. Throughout the earlier films, I thought of the “Toy Story” franchise as appealing to the inner child, but the latest installment makes it clear that the appeal is now more specifically to the inner parent. We rarely experience scenes here from a kid’s perspective, but the toys are clearly an extended family, at once relatives, educators, even our life coaches. Some characters are at first focused on themselves, but they all evolve to the point where they are exclusively driven by doing what’s right for the children, in helping them to grow and become socialized. “Toy Story 5” is also driven by notions of peer pressures and of obsolescence, and the apparently terrifying idea that children will someday grow up and shift away from their parents — childish things to be put away, as if they were so many cowboy and spaceman action figures.Perhaps that’s one reason why, five feature-length chapters in, Woody and Buzz seem more real to us than characters in other movies, or even Mr. Hanks or Mr. Allen themselves, or even people in our own lives. Cassius was right: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our toys, but in ourselves.

Our Toys, Our Selves: ‘Toy Story 5’ Grows Up With Its Audience

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