YNOT at the Movies

There's something self-defeating about a movie that asks you to put down your screens by showing you a screen, perhaps bigger. Thirty-one years after Andrew Stanton and company helped invent the modern animated blockbuster, "Toy Story 5" (USA 2026 | 102 min.) comes with something worth fighting for. It fights for that something as unconvincingly as possible.

The setup is savvy enough. Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and the rest of the gang belong to Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), an 8-year-old who inherited them from their original owner Andy, now years into college. Bonnie's a sweet kid, but a struggling one: her peers have traded playtime for screen time, and the arrival of Lilypad (Greta Lee), a frog-shaped smart tablet with her own agenda for helping Bonnie connect with friends, upends the toy ecosystem of her bedroom. The premise has real potential. The film squanders it.

This film doesn't trust that potential enough to make a real argument for the toys' relevance. Instead, it offers a deeply unconvincing one: screens are bad because they'll get you bullied. That's the thesis. Not that imaginative play fosters creativity, not that physical toys build something in a child that a tablet simply can't. Just go online and bad things happen. For a franchise that once made moviegoers weep over a cowboy doll staring at the stars, it's a staggering drop in emotional and intellectual ambition.

What fills the gap is noise and franchise muscle, and neither does much to make the characters stick. Hanks and Allen are recognizable voices, but the film gives them so little to chew on that they function less as characters than as brand mascots. The supporting ensemble, new and returning alike, blurs together into a pleasant, forgettable hum. Conan O'Brien's Smarty Pants, a wisecracking toilet-training toy, lands a few real laughs before fading into the crowd. Pixar leans hard on accumulated affection here, banking on the audience to supply the emotion the film itself never builds. The film tries to diagnose a cultural problem, then offers a shrug where a solution should be.

The meta-irony cuts deepest: watching "Toy Story 5" is not the same thing as playing with toys. It never was. The earlier films understood this; their emotional power came from how they made you feel about childhood, not from lecturing you to have one. This fifth sequel confuses the two, producing a movie that will satisfy the very young, for whom the characters alone are enough, and franchise devotees who will find comfort in familiar names. Everyone else will sense the hollowness beneath the noise.

"Toy Story 5" opens in theaters on Friday, June 19, 2026.