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screenplay by Andrew Stanton & McKenna Harris
directed by Andrew Stanton (co-directed by McKenna Harris)
by Walter Chaw Toy Story 5 is the fifth film in a 31-year-old franchise, and it’s exhausted as fuck and fuck it’s exhausting, but that’s okay since it’s just for kids. When the first one was released, its main selling point was the leap it represented in computer animation–a sour film with a clever (if travel-worn) premise that essentially made Pixar the 600-lb gorilla. And for a while, they delivered, cranking out masterpieces like an all-digital Studio Ghibli, pushing the technological envelope a little further each time. I remember Monsters, Inc. being sold in part on the skill and time invested in making Sulley’s shag pelt move realistically, and the later Finding Nemo breaking new ground in CGI water. So, naturally, Toy Story 5 is about how technology is destroying a child’s imagination by changing how they engage with the world–just like how in Toy Story, Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) initially hated his eventual best friend Buzz (Tim Allen) for changing the way their child master played with him, leading him to trick the dimwitted Buzz into getting dangerously lost before growing a conscience under threat from his other friends. I don’t disagree that unleashing the Internet on the world was like giving automatic rifles to chimps, but there must be more to say about it than “haha, whoops.” But, look, it doesn’t matter if waves of black irony roil off every immaculately, impressively computer-generated frame of this death march. Show it to your kids. They’ll like it. Feed them deep-fried butter. They’ll like that, too. Teach them to smoke. Mmmmm, heroin.
Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), inheritor of Buzz and Jessie (Joan Cusack), is having trouble making friends because everyone her age is addicted to screens. Concerned, her parents buy her a starter tablet called Lilypad (Greta Lee; the first Asian-American voice in one of these films plays an evil computer, which is absolutely fine because this is for kids who are figuring out how to see the world and the people in it), enabling Bonnie to join a chatroom with her mean friends who have grown up too fast. I say this because Jessie’s dialogue is mainly extended harangues about how technology ages children. Not Buzz technology, presumably, but the Internet, and I guess I can’t disagree with that, either. When I was growing up, porn was the Sears catalogue underwear section and “Benny Hill” in late-night syndication on a blurry, nine-inch black-and-white TV. (Forty-five years later, Boots Randolph still feels like foreplay.) Jessie wants to check out these so-called “friends” Lilypad has facilitated for Bonnie and, in so doing, of course gets lost, leading to the return of Woody and, oh, a shipping container full of upgraded Buzz toys who shout out literally to Freaks and emotionally to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and Ghoulies. There must be 500 characters with speaking parts in Toy Story 5. There are almost as many attempts to jerk tears from your skull–including a new Taylor Swift song that I’ve already heard a dozen times at the grocery store since it dropped last week–and dozens of awkward reunions and “geez yer old, Woody” jokes that raise more questions than they answer. For instance, toys develop male-pattern baldness? Do they also experience enlarged prostates and incontinence? Do they get dementia? They suffer shame and suicidal ideation, that’s for sure, which also opens up a can of worms. Like, what do you tell your kids when Lilypad tries to kill itself? You tell them, “Shut up and like it.”
I tried cobbling together a plot summary, but this is really just another iteration of “toy is misplaced and needs rescuing.” There are flashbacks to abandonment trauma recycled from previous Toy Storys and tedious re-introductions of characters and relationships. Director Andrew Stanton, brought back to Little Dutch Boy the holes appearing in Pixar’s reputation thanks to corporate mismanagement, creative capitulations to phantom controversies, and rumours of workplace strife (the sort of thing that happens when your former CEO is Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear), has correctly identified the target audience for this garbage as 50-year-old children and eight-year-old children. But, look, the young audience couldn’t possibly care about lore, and the nostalgic old millennial/late-Gen-X dorks surely deserve better than “tech will turn the younglings into zombies” scare tactics, even if that nostalgia has them force-feeding this bland saltine host to their helpless offspring. Pixar’s screeching to the choir here. Besides, where do they think all these grown children gather to complain about their cult objects being taken seriously, other than the social media spaces Toy Story 5 vilifies?
Ultimately, what I’m left with is that the toys determine who the “right” friends are for Bonnie; Toy Story 5 isn’t interested in saving kids but rather profiling them. The rest deserve to be hollowed-out meat pockets, animated by the LED glow of their handheld devices. In Mandarin, a cell phone is two words that mean “hand engine” but phonetically sound like “hand chicken,” making me think of masturbation. This doesn’t have anything to do with the movie–or does it? Toy Story 5 uses our late-stage idiocratic “it’s not that deep, bro” anti-culture as cover for its byzantine, self-swallowing balderdash. It’s ostensibly a warning about technology torturously bullhorned through a few dozen mainframes of top-of-the-line computer-generated images to gaslight your children into a garbled point of view about…nothing. As warnings go, it’s like the one a scorpion might give to a Good Samaritan frog. A better warning would be that Toy Story 5 categorizes children as “worth saving” and “not worth saving,” then makes deus ex machina heroes out of dozens of identically extruded and programmed plastic robots, voiced by a typecast Tim Allen. Technology is feckless and dangerous when it’s wielded thoughtlessly and in excess, you say? Physician, heal thyself.
