★★★★ - EMPIRE
- The old toys face a new, high-tech competitor: a tablet called Lilypad (Greta Lee), that threatens to displace them. Jessie (Joan Cusack) leads the fight against this unwelcome tech incursion. -
Pixar’s Toy Story series has always been at home with wistfulness and melancholy, because the nature of toys means their time is fleeting and their worth ephemeral. If the cowboy doll is not displaced by a spaceman, he will still be rendered obsolete by adolescence and adulthood, however hard he tries to enchant and entertain. The first three films taught us that the work is still meaningful even if the love is finite, but the fourth struggled for a similarly powerful theme. This latest outing, however, is a welcome return to philosophical form as well as being funny, warm-hearted and largely — perhaps overly — optimistic.
The challenge the toys face now, as director and writer Andrew Stanton and co-director and co-screenwriter Kenna Harris make clear, is existential. Screen-time threatens to conquer all: it not only monopolises time that would have been spent with physical amusements but could displace imaginative play entirely in favour of structured games. Even the gang’s owner, Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), is not immune to its lure when she gets a new Lilypad tablet, voiced by Greta Lee.
This interloper is confident in her ability to connect Bonnie with new friends that the lonely girl desperately needs. Jessie (Joan Cusack), who now leads the gang after Woody (Tom Hanks) went off to rescue abandoned toys in the last film, is unconvinced. Wary of this high-tech invader — like Woody before her — she forms her own plans for Bonnie. Alas, Jessie’s attempts to help leave her separated from her crew and forced to confront her own fear of abandonment, while Buzz (Tim Allen) and the rest set out to get her back.
Perhaps that should be Buzzes: in the film’s most entertaining subplot, a literal raft of brand-new Buzz Lightyear toys are washed overboard from a container ship and set out to reach “Space Command” and civilisation (the in-universe franchise seems to be doing better than Lightyear). Their adventures are, for much of the film, an unconnected counterpoint to the main tale, but they offer an outsized share of the humour. Other new elements include the abandoned toys Jessie meets, led by Conan O’Brien’s ‘Smarty Pants’, a potty-training tech device shaped like a toilet roll that should delight the more scatalogically minded members of the audience.
The film’s lead, however, is Jessie, finally taking over from the Woody and Buzz double-act. Cusack’s character has been a reliable sidekick across three films, but this story delves back into that ‘When She Loved Me’-scored montage in Toy Story 2 that explained the loss of her original owner and the lingering trauma she suffered as a result. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house for that, and Randy Newman’s score here dips regularly back into the melody of that Sarah McLachlan tearjerker to really tug the heartstrings as Jessie panics about this latest rejection.
You could read an element of ‘old man yells at cloud’ in the studio’s depiction of a nightmare world where everyone is on their screen all the time and thereby prevented from interacting with one another. Of course, they’re not wrong in identifying tech as a cause of human loneliness and a sap to creativity. What’s more surprising is that they ultimately come to a deeply moderate conclusion. Screen time can, it says, be helpful as part of a balanced leisure diet, which is something any conscientious parent could have told them in the first place.
It’s remarkably mild given the studio has historically argued quite fiercely for the power and indeed primacy of human creativity in story after story, though perhaps less surprising when you consider that they share a founder with Apple and a home with the tech world in the Bay Area. Their conclusion is reasonable and commonsensical, with only an edge of starry-eyed optimism, but you have to look very hard to spot the radical edge and simmering anger of WALL•E or The Incredibles under this last act. Perhaps it’s in the throwaway comment about the life expectancy of tech toys, or in the way that this retroactively gives more force to the last film. Reading between the lines, an entire generation of toys will soon need the rescue service run by Woody and Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves, fifth-from-last billed) — and that’s a gloomy thought. But in the meantime, one little girl and her cowgirl doll find a path through, and we can all take comfort from that.
- Helen O'Hara, EMPIRE
Toy Story 5 is now playing at Light House Cinema!