'Toy Story 5' Review: A Heartfelt Return, But it Might Be Time to Leave the Toys in the Box
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- 4 min read
By Dan Bremner - June 23, 2026
The fifth, although technically sixth, film in Pixar's long-running and critically adored animated franchise. Like a great many people my age, I grew up with these films, with the original almost certainly being one of the very first I ever watched as a child. While the consensus has long held that Toy Story 3 should have been the natural endpoint, I genuinely found the Toy Story 4 to be a fitting epilogue that earned its existence rather than simply extending a brand past its welcome. After the ill-fated spin-off, Lightyear, failed to register with anyone, myself included, leaving me still genuinely unsure what to make of its dull and continuity-breaking strangeness, it was always inevitable that the path of least resistance and greatest profitability led back to a fifth proper outing for the toys.
For the most part Toy Story 5 is a fun and well-crafted entry, but it noticeably lacks the genuine emotional gut-punches and accumulated heart of its predecessors, landing comfortably as the weakest entry in the main series so far. The weakest Toy Story film is still, it should be said, a considerably higher bar than most animated franchises ever clear.
The introduction of Lilypad, voiced with genuine wit and personality by Greta Lee, gives the film its central conceit and its most contemporary thematic concern, the disruptive arrival of digital technology into Bonnie's analogue world of imaginative toy play. The film handles this with a reasonable amount of nuance for the most part, though there's no escaping the sense that the iPad bad messaging arrives roughly a decade later than it would have landed with genuine cultural freshness. It increasingly has the energy of an old man shouting at a cloud about screens, and while I am broadly and enthusiastically sympathetic to the underlying sentiment, genuinely, my phone is a curse (I want to smash it against the wall every day, but the stock market won't let me) and the world would unquestionably be better off with considerably less addictive technology in all our lives, the execution here feels like it's relitigating a cultural conversation that has already mostly happened rather than saying anything particularly new about it.
Jessie is unambiguously the film's emotional centre and this is very much being correctly billed as her film. Joan Cusack delivers career-highlight work, finding genuine and resonant depths in Jessie's evolving questions about belonging, purpose and what it means to matter in a household whose attention is increasingly fractured by competing demands on a child's imagination. It is the strongest sustained character work in the film by a considerable distance and gives the franchise a genuinely fresh emotional throughline rather than simply repeating beats from earlier instalments. Andrew Stanton's return to the director's chair alongside co-director McKenna Harris brings back a confident, nimble sense of pacing and philosophical curiosity that feels like a genuine return for the franchise's classic strengths, even within a film that doesn't reach the heights of his earlier contributions to the series.
The action and set pieces remain genuinely impressive, with inventive use of Bonnie's imagination generating some wonderfully stylised and creative sequences that showcase Pixar's animation craft at a very high level, even as the overall visual leap from the fourth film is noticeably smaller than previous instalments managed. It's a good-looking film without being a transformative one, the diminishing returns of incremental technical advancement becoming more apparent with each successive entry. The Buzz Lightyear material, involving multiple Buzzes attempting to find their way home, is genuinely the film's weakest structural element, playing out with the disjointed, lower-stakes energy of a Disney+ short rather than something that belongs in a proper theatrical entry, and the constant cutaways disrupt the film's momentum more than they add to it. The third act does rescue this material considerably, pulling the threads together with enough genuine payoff to retroactively justify some of the patience required to get there.
The classic ensemble suffers the most from this instalment's choices. Buzz (Tim Allen), Woody (Tom Hanks) and especially the beloved supporting players, Rex, Hamm, Slinky, Mr Potato Head, are reduced to padding and background presence for substantial stretches, and Woody in particular feels genuinely superfluous this time around, with the film's attempts to reintegrate him into the emotional core feeling forced in ways that simply highlight how thoroughly the story has moved its centre of gravity towards Jessie and the new characters. It's a reasonable creative choice in isolation but it does mean the film never achieves the full ensemble warmth that made the earlier entries so beloved.
Given that Toy Story 6 is an absolute inevitability at this point regardless of how anyone feels about franchise fatigue, I'd like to propose what I genuinely believe would be the most interesting and radical direction available to the series. Let Toy Story 6 be the film where the toys finally reveal themselves to the world, full disclosure, no more hiding. Then let Toy Story 7 (simply titled “Woody”) explore the genuinely dark aftermath of that reveal, a Logan-style narrative set in a world that has responded to the existence of sentient toys with fear and violence, toys destroyed en masse, with an aging Woody as one of the last survivors tasked with guiding a young toy to safety across a hostile, toy-fearing America. That is a story with genuine stakes, genuine darkness and genuine thematic ambition that this franchise has more than earned the right to attempt. It would also, undeniably, be an enormous departure from everything Pixar has built this franchise to be, but at five films deep the safest possible path is clearly not where the most interesting stories live anymore.
Toy Story 5 is another funny, well animated and genuinely heartfelt entry that simply cannot match the heights of what came before it, weighed down by a slightly dated central message and a structural choice that sidelines too many of the characters that made the franchise great, even if Jessie getting the spotlight is a nice change of pace. Worth seeing and enjoyable, but very much the least essential chapter in one of cinema's greatest animated franchises.
'Toy Story 5' released in cinemas on June 19, 2026.
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