Toy Story 5 Review: A Fun, Familiar Return

The film opens in Bonnie’s room, where the familiar chaos of playtime is in full swing. Jessie is roping a stuffed armadillo, Rex is trying to roar convincingly in a cardboard castle, and Forky is, as always, philosophizing about his own existence. The peace shatters when Bonnie unwraps a Lilypad tablet - a sleek, intuitive device that responds to voice, touch, and even eye movement. Within days, the tablet becomes her sole focus. Bonnie’s fingers swipe, tap, and scroll; the toys are ignored.

Enter the tablet’s operating system, voiced with chilly corporate warmth by Greta Lee. It’s a polite, efficient program that introduces a suite of apps, all designed to keep Bonnie engaged. But the true antagonist is the tablet’s virus-hunting “Smarty Pants,” a manic, self-aware firewall voiced by Conan O’Brien. He sees the toys as rogue data - obsolete, static, in need of deletion. Woody and Buzz must lead the gang into the tablet’s digital world, a brightly lit labyrinth of notifications, ad pop-ups, and endless scrolling, to rescue a corrupted Forky and restore Bonnie’s attention to the analog realm.

The strength of “Toy Story 5” lies in its world-building. Stanton and his team render the inside of the Lilypad tablet with dizzying, candy-colored invention. The “Notification Highway” is a frantic race of pinging alerts; the “App Store” resembles a neon bazaar where every icon tries to upsell you. It’s a smart visual argument for how our devices operate like a Fun Fair designed by a behaviorist. The action sequences are crisp and inventive, particularly a set piece where the toys must navigate a loading screen that keeps freezing and buffering, a nightmare of patience for Buzz.

Tom Hanks delivers his trademark vulnerability as Woody, now a seasoned leader who must contend with a threat that doesn’t punch or bite - it distracts. His quiet scenes, watching Bonnie’s face glow blue from the screen, carry the film’s emotional weight. Tim Allen gets a few good Buzz moments, especially when he insists on treating the digital realm with the same earnest logic he applied to space, but his character arc is thinner here. The standout is Conan O’Brien, whose “Smarty Pants” is a hilarious, petulant nightmare. He delivers lines about “defragmenting your attention span” with the glee of a man who just deleted your saved game.

The film’s best moment comes when the toys, hiding in Bonnie’s backpack as she goes to school, hear her whisper, “I love you, Lilypad,” to the tablet. The silence in the room is crushing. It’s a quiet, devastating reminder of what they’ve lost: the simple, undivided gaze of a child.

Yet, for all its cleverness, “Toy Story 5” struggles with pacing. The middle act, a slog through a series of app-themed levels, feels overlong. The emotional payoff - though heartfelt - arrives with a bluntness that lacks the gut-punch subtlety of the first film’s farewell or “Toy Story 3”’s incinerator scene. And the resolution, which involves a clever trick with airplane mode, feels a bit too neat for an addiction-themed allegory. The film acknowledges the problem but offers a Band-Aid solution.

Pros

• The brilliant, visually inventive depiction of a digital ecosystem inside a tablet.
• Conan O’Brien’s performance as Smarty Pants is a comic highlight.
• Greta Lee brings a chilling, placid menace to the Lilypad OS.
• The film’s central theme - the battle for a child’s attention - is timely and relatable.
• Strong animation that pushes the franchise into new aesthetic territory.

Cons

• The emotional core feels forced compared to earlier films; the farewell is less earned.
• The middle act drags through repetitive “level” challenges.
• Buzz Lightyear is underutilized, relegated to comic relief in the digital realm.
• The resolution is too tidy for a story about screen addiction, undercutting its own message.

“Toy Story 5” is a commendable, if uneven, continuation of a franchise that has set an impossibly high bar. It earns its place with a smart concept, a stellar voice cast, and a genuine affection for its characters. But it lacks the devastating elegance of the series’ best entries. It’s a fun, thoughtful sequel that will delight younger viewers and spark conversations for parents, but for those who grew up with Woody and Buzz, it may feel like a pleasant diversion rather than an essential pilgrimage. Recommended, with tempered expectations.