Toy Story 5 (2026)

 Toy Story 5 (2026)

6/10

Starring the voices of

Tom Hanks

Tim Allen

Joan Cusack

Conan O'Brien

Scarlett Spears

Directed by Andrew Stanton

The main challenge many of us have is, will Toy Story 5 be any good?

The answer is, it is still good.

Toy Story 5 is not bad. I'll recommend it, but it's not magical the way the first four were.

Disney has built an IP they can milk for as long as we keep going back to see the tale of the toys we all met with Andy back in 1995, when I was 10.

Fair warning, the first half feels like a rehash of Toy Story 1, this time it's Bonnie drifting from her toys to Lilypad, her tablet. You know how kids are these days with their phones and tablets, many don't know how to make real friends without one in between.

The whole movie is really Jessie having an existential crisis over losing Bonnie's attention to a screen. She loses herself wondering if she's a bad toy because of it, and calls Woody for reassurance. He takes the call the wrong way, thinks she needs rescuing, and that misread is what gets the whole crew back together again, though honestly, the reunion wasn't anywhere near as grand as I expected.

Running through all of it, right to the ending, Buzz is trying to propose to Jessie. That thread alone kept me more entertained than most of the main plot.

The whole focus here is on Jessie, she's the lead now, responsible for Bonnie's happiness.

Jessie ends up lost on the road after Bonnie leaves her in the car during a sleepover. An old couple finds her, and since she still has her old owner Emily's address on her heel, they bring her there, thinking she still belongs to her.

Emily's gone, but a girl named Blaze lives there now, going through the same screen and lack of real friends phase as Bonnie, and Jessie ends up dealing with Blaze's own gadgets along the way.

So the whole movie is Jessie discovering someone she believes would be the best kind of friend for Bonnie, and now she needs to find a way to get them to meet.

When it comes to the voice casting, I have to say the nostalgia of the old ones is something that warmed my heart, and the new ones were just so good that they fit in easily.

The one thing in this whole movie that really had me going what, and didn't sit well with me, is Lilypad hacking devices in Bonnie's home and sending fake text messages to manipulate and steer outcomes.

My real takeaway, this is worth it for Jessie's arc alone. The depth they gave her, her past, how she ends up teaching two kids that being different matters more than fitting in, that's this movie in a nutshell.

Still, I'd call this above average for the Toy Story standard.