I never grew up with Toy Story toys. But my son sure did. Buzz on the bookshelf. Woody on the bed. A Rex toy that lost its tail around 2018 and was never replaced because, by then, he'd moved on to something else. I've watched him cycle through obsessions the way kids do, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, these movies became the one constant we shared. We watched them together more times than I can count—on road trips, on sick days, on random Tuesday nights when nothing else was on.
And I will bet a lot of you did, too.
So sitting in that theater for Toy Story 5, I wasn't just watching a movie. I was watching something that belongs to both of us, in the way only certain things do. Somewhere between the opening scene and the credits, I stopped thinking about the screen and started thinking about him—about what it means to watch someone you love grow up right in front of you and how love doesn't go away when things change. It just takes a different shape. After five films and thirty years, Toy Story still understands that better than almost anything else out there.
Whatever you felt about Toy Story 4, you have to see this film.
Bonnie is older now, and her attention keeps drifting toward Lilypad—a sleek, intelligent interactive device voiced by Greta Lee. Lee is a revelation. She doesn't play Lilypad as a villain. She plays her as something far more unsettling: a character who is confident, persuasive, and genuinely convinced she knows what's best. That's the tension the film lives in. Lilypad represents what every parent and child eventually hits—a new world that's shinier, faster, and impossible to argue with. Lee brings real grace to it. You don't hate Lilypad. That's the point.
Then there's Smarty Pants—voiced by Conan O'Brien—and honestly, he's the reason I laughed until my sides hurt. Conan doesn't just voice the character; he is the character. Every scene he's in spirals gloriously off the rails, and yet somehow it always lands. The absurdity, the timing, the sudden flashes of genuine sweetness — nobody else could have done this. There's one tangent in the second act where the audience around me went completely silent before erupting. Pure chaos. Perfectly timed. Only Conan.
But under all that humor is something harder. Woody, Buzz, and Jessie aren't worried about being played with anymore. What do you do when the role that gave your life meaning starts to disappear? What do you do when someone you love grows into a version of themselves you can't quite reach? The legacy arcs don't feel like nostalgia bait. They feel like honest reckonings—with aging, with friendship, and with the particular courage it takes to keep loving someone you're slowly losing.
And yet, for all the affection audiences have for Woody and Buzz, Toy Story 5 ultimately belongs to Jessie. Voiced once again by Joan Cusack, Jessie becomes the emotional anchor of the film in a way that feels both surprising and inevitable. She has always been the toy most haunted by being left behind, carrying the wounds of abandonment more openly than the others. Here, those fears haven't vanished—they've simply changed shape. Jessie watches Bonnie grow older with a heartbreaking mixture of pride, fear, and acceptance, and Cusack performs it with a quiet honesty that never reaches for easy emotion. She doesn't fight the passage of time, nor does she deny the pain that comes with it. Instead, she learns to love through change, and in doing so becomes the film's clearest expression of its central truth: that loving someone has never meant keeping them exactly as they were. Sometimes it means letting them become who they are meant to be while holding close the memories that helped shape you both.
There's a specific kind of dread that runs through this film—not the dread of something bad happening, but the dread of something inevitable. Watching Bonnie drift away, I kept thinking about that moment of clear-eyed awareness before heartbreak. You see it coming. You can't stop it. Jessie sees it most clearly of all. She watches Bonnie growing up in real time, and she doesn't rage against it. She simply carries it. That restraint is what makes the film devastating. Nothing goes wrong. Nobody betrays anybody. Time just moves forward, the way it always does, and the film sits quietly inside that truth instead of flinching away from it.
That kind of restraint doesn't happen by accident. Director Andrew Stanton and co-director McKenna Harris don't lean on nostalgia as a crutch. They let these characters age honestly. The result is something rare: a sequel that earns its place in the story instead of just extending it. And the Taylor Swift song, “I Knew It, I Knew You” cements it all.
When the credits rolled, I sat there longer than I needed to. Not because of the music, but because I wasn't ready to leave yet. I was thinking about my son—twelve years old, too old for a lot of things now, but not too old for this. He'd probably never admit it to his friends, but walking out of that theater, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, "That was really good, Dad." High praise from a kid who is learning to be critical of entertainment. That Buzz on his bookshelf, that tailless Rex—they're still there. He knows it. I know it. And somehow Toy Story 5 knows it too. The real story has never been about growing up. It's about what we choose to hold onto—and why that choice, more than anything else, is what makes us who we are.
Toy Story 5 is pure fire.
MPAA Rating: PG.
Runtime: 102 mins
Director: McKenna Harris; Andrew Stanton
Writer: McKenna Harris; Andrew Stanton
Cast: Tom Hanks; Tim Allen; Joan Cusack
Genre: Comedy | Animation | Family
Tagline: Hi! Let's Play
Memorable Movie Quote: "II don't know, Jessie. Toys are for play, but tech... is for everything."
Distributor: Disney/Pixar
Official Site:
Release Date:June 19, 2026
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date:
Synopsis: Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the rest of the gang's jobs are challenged when they're introduced to electronics, a new threat to playtime.
