Toy Story 5 (2026) [Movie Review]
I had one thought after leaving Toy Story 5. Nobody asked for a fifth Toy Story. After the near-perfect emotional landing of Toy Story 4 in 2019, the smart money said Pixar should leave well enough alone, and plenty of us braced for Toy Story 5 to be the soulless cash grab that finally tarnished the most beloved franchise in animation history. I am delighted to report that it is nothing of the sort.
Andrew Stanton’s Toy Story 5 is a sharp, funny, surprisingly pointed entry that takes aim at the single biggest threat to childhood play in 2026, the glowing screen, and it does so with the wit and heart that made us fall for these characters thirty years ago. Now in theaters and already shattering box office records, Toy Story 5 is the rare legacy sequel that justifies its own existence.
Table of Contents
The Quick Take
The verdict: Toy Story 5 is a genuine return to form, a smart, heartfelt, frequently hilarious adventure that pits Woody, Buzz, and the gang against a kid’s new tablet obsession. Andrew Stanton and Pixar take the timely “iPad kid” anxiety and build a story that is optimistic without being naive, and the result is one of the strongest films in the entire franchise.
| Category | Score |
|---|---|
| Story and Heart | 90 / 100 |
| Animation and Visuals | 94 / 100 |
| Voice Cast | 92 / 100 |
| Music | 88 / 100 |
| Overall | 91 / 100 |
Bottom line: See it, and see it on the biggest screen you can find. This is a family film that earns its laughs and its tears, and it is essential summer moviegoing. Best for: Families, lifelong Toy Story fans who grew up with the series, parents wrestling with screen time, and anyone who loves Pixar at its sincere best. One caveat: This is the first mainline Toy Story film rated PG rather than G, for some thematic elements and rude humor. It is still very much a family film, but it reaches for slightly older emotional territory. Format reviewed: Theatrical, including IMAX and premium large format (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Pixar) | approximately 100 minutes | Rated PG | Released June 19, 2026.
To Infinity, and Then Two More Years
Toy Story 5 picks up roughly two years after the events of Toy Story 4, with Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Jessie, and the rest of the gang settled into life with their kid, Bonnie, who is now around eight years old. For longtime followers of the series, that time jump matters, because the central anxiety of every Toy Story film has always been the same: the terror of being outgrown, of the child you love moving on to something new and leaving you in the toy box. Toy Story 5 takes that perennial fear and updates it for the present moment in the most obvious and effective way imaginable. Bonnie is growing up in 2026, and in 2026, the thing that replaces toys is not another, cooler toy. It is a screen.
The premise of Toy Story 5 is built around that collision. Bonnie receives a smart tablet, a kid-focused device named Lilypad, and almost overnight the toys find themselves competing for her attention against something they cannot possibly match: a glowing rectangle that talks back, plays games, speaks every language, and never runs out of new tricks. Woody and the gang have faced rivals before, jealous new arrivals, the lure of a museum, the call of the wider world, but they have never faced anything quite like this. Toy Story 5 understands that the tablet is not just a new character. It is an existential threat to the entire concept of play that the franchise has always celebrated, and that gives the film genuine stakes.
What impressed me most about how Toy Story 5 handles its setup is the refusal to be preachy. It would have been so easy for a film about the dangers of screen time to wag its finger, to turn into a ninety-minute lecture about putting down the iPad. Instead, Toy Story 5 treats the subject with nuance, acknowledging the real pull of these devices while making its case for the irreplaceable magic of imaginative, hands-on play. The film has been widely praised as optimistic without pulling its punches or being unrealistic, and that is exactly the right balance for material that could have gone so wrong.
There’s a Tablet in the Toy Box
The breakout character of Toy Story 5, and the key to whether the whole enterprise works, is Lilypad herself, voiced by Greta Lee. Lily, as she prefers to be called, could have been a one-note villain, a cold piece of technology to be defeated and discarded. The film is smarter than that. Lilypad is genuinely charming, endlessly capable, and not really malicious so much as obliviously, cheerfully consuming of Bonnie’s attention, which makes her a far more interesting and modern antagonist than a simple bad guy would have been. Greta Lee’s voice work gives Lily a breezy, helpful, slightly insufferable energy that any parent who has watched a child disappear into a device will recognize instantly.
The conflict between the toys and Lilypad drives the heart of Toy Story 5, and it plays out with the inventive comic set pieces the franchise is known for. Jessie, in particular, takes the lead in the toys’ campaign to win Bonnie back to the world of physical play, and the friction between her old-school belief in toys and Lily’s seamless digital appeal generates both the film’s biggest laughs and its most pointed observations. Toy Story 5 mines real comedy from the culture clash, the way the analog and the digital simply speak different languages, and it never loses sight of the emotional truth underneath the jokes, which is that every toy in that room is terrified of being rendered obsolete. It is a feeling the franchise has always understood, and Toy Story 5 gives it a fresh and timely face.
Buzz Lightyear, Marooned in Demo Mode
Running alongside the main story, Toy Story 5 delivers a second thread that gives Buzz Lightyear his own showcase, and it is a clever bit of franchise self-awareness. The film introduces a cargo ship loaded with a unit of hi-tech, next-generation edition Buzz Lightyear toys that crash-lands on a deserted island. Stuck in demo mode, these shipwrecked Buzzes must figure out how to escape, and the sequence plays as both an adventure in its own right and a sly commentary on the very nature of sequels and product lines, on what it means to be the newer, shinier model.
This subplot is where Toy Story 5 gets to flex its visual muscle, trading the cozy domestic spaces of Bonnie’s room for the wide-open spectacle of an island survival adventure. It is a smart structural choice, giving the film a change of scenery and a sense of scale while keeping Buzz, the franchise’s other great anchor, in play. Toy Story 5 has always been at its best when it balances the intimate emotional drama of the toys’ relationship with their kid against bigger, funnier adventure mechanics, and the marooned-Buzz storyline provides exactly that contrast. The way the two threads eventually intertwine is part of the pleasure of the film, and I will leave the specifics for you to discover on the big screen.
The Old Gang and the New Faces
A Toy Story film lives and dies on its voice cast, and Toy Story 5 reassembles the essential players while welcoming a strong group of newcomers. Tom Hanks returns as Woody, and after five films and three decades, his performance remains the warm, weathered, slightly anxious soul of the entire franchise. Tim Allen is back as Buzz Lightyear, as reliably funny and earnest as ever, and Joan Cusack’s Jessie steps further into the spotlight here than she has in years, which is a welcome development given how much the story leans on her. The familiar comfort of these voices is a huge part of why Toy Story 5 works. These are characters we have grown up alongside, and slipping back into their company feels like coming home.
The new additions are well chosen. Greta Lee, as discussed, makes Lilypad a standout. Conan O’Brien joins the cast as a new character, bringing his particular brand of manic comic energy, and Ernie Hudson steps into the role of Combat Carl, respectfully taking over the part originated by the late Carl Weathers. Tony Hale returns as the gloriously neurotic Forky from Toy Story 4, and the broader ensemble is rounded out by returning favorites and a deep bench of supporting talent. Toy Story 5 understands that the franchise’s secret weapon has always been its ability to make even minor toys feel like fully realized characters, and the film honors that tradition. The voice work across the board is excellent, and the new faces blend seamlessly into the established world.
Behind the music stands a familiar name as well. Randy Newman returns to score Toy Story 5, as he has for every film in the series, and his presence provides a crucial thread of continuity. The franchise without Newman’s music would not feel like the franchise at all, and his work here once again underscores the emotional beats without ever overplaying them. There is a comfort in hearing those familiar musical textures return, a sonic signal that no matter how much the world inside the film has changed, the soul of Toy Story remains intact.
It is also quietly poignant to consider how much real-world time the voice cast carries into these roles. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen have now voiced Woody and Buzz across thirty years of their own lives, aging into and alongside these characters in a way that gives their performances an unspoken weight. When Woody worries about being left behind in Toy Story 5, there is more than a script at work. There is the accumulated history of an actor who has returned to this role again and again across an entire career, and that lived continuity bleeds into the performance in ways a brand-new voice could never replicate. The handing of Combat Carl from the late Carl Weathers to Ernie Hudson is a reminder, too, that these films now span enough time to carry their own losses, which only deepens the franchise’s recurring meditation on impermanence and legacy.
Andrew Stanton and Pixar’s Comeback Year
Toy Story 5 arrives at a pivotal moment for Pixar, and it is worth understanding the context, because it makes the film’s success all the more meaningful. The studio that once seemed incapable of missing had, in recent years, stumbled through a period of uncertainty, with original films underperforming and sequels carrying an outsized share of the load. Toy Story 5 represents a major bet, made with the largest budget in Pixar’s history at a reported $250 million, and the studio handed the project to one of its most trusted veterans.
Andrew Stanton is Pixar royalty. The director of Finding Nemo and WALL-E, and a key creative voice on the original Toy Story films, Stanton understands these characters and this world as well as anyone alive, and his sensibility is all over Toy Story 5. The film has the structural confidence and emotional intelligence of a filmmaker who knows exactly what makes a Toy Story story tick, and it never feels like a committee product or a brand extension running on autopilot. Together with co-director McKenna Harris, Stanton has crafted a film that respects the legacy of the franchise while finding something genuinely new to say. Coming in a year when Pixar has already enjoyed success with the original film Hoppers, Toy Story 5 caps what is shaping up to be a real comeback for the studio, and it is a reminder of what Pixar can do when it brings its full craft and sincerity to bear. The animation, as you would expect, is gorgeous, with the studio’s technology rendering both the tactile warmth of the toys and the cold gleam of the tablet world in stunning detail.
Screens, Kids, and the Things We Outgrow
Beneath the comedy and the adventure, Toy Story 5 is wrestling with something that every parent in the audience is living through right now, and that thematic relevance is the film’s greatest strength. The so-called iPad kid has become a genuine cultural anxiety, the image of a child glued to a screen, and Toy Story 5 walks directly into that conversation. By making the antagonist a tablet rather than another toy, the film transforms the franchise’s evergreen theme of being outgrown into a sharp commentary on the way technology is reshaping childhood itself.
What keeps Toy Story 5 from feeling like a scold is its essential generosity. The film does not demonize Bonnie for loving her tablet, nor does it pretend that screens are simply evil. It acknowledges their genuine appeal while making an impassioned, moving case for the things that play with toys gives a child that a device cannot: imagination, creativity, the freedom to build worlds rather than consume them. This is heady material for a family film, and the fact that Toy Story 5 handles it with such grace, landing its message without ever sacrificing entertainment, is the clearest sign that the people who made it cared deeply about getting it right. The shift to a PG rating reflects this slightly more mature reach, and while Toy Story 5 remains firmly a film for the whole family, it is unafraid to engage with real, complicated feelings about growing up in a connected world. That the film manages to be optimistic about all of it, to suggest that play and connection can survive even the glowing rectangle, is genuinely heartening. Like the best Pixar films, Toy Story 5 sends kids out happy and parents out a little misty.
Did Toy Story Need a Fifth Round?
Let me address the question every skeptic, myself included, walked into the theater carrying, because it is the central debate around this film. Did Toy Story really need a fifth installment? Toy Story 3 gave the franchise what felt like a perfect ending, with the toys passing to a new child, and Toy Story 4 then delivered a second, more bittersweet farewell as Woody chose a new path. By any reasonable measure, the story was complete, twice over, and the cynical read on Toy Story 5 was that Disney simply could not leave a billion-dollar franchise alone.
I went in a skeptic and came out converted, and here is why. Toy Story 5 earns its place not by repeating what came before but by finding a genuinely new and timely angle, the threat of technology to play, that none of the previous films could have explored. The themes feel organic to the series rather than bolted on, a natural evolution of the franchise’s lifelong preoccupation with being needed and being left behind. The critical response bears this out, with the film earning a sterling 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a coveted A grade from audiences on CinemaScore, numbers that put Toy Story 5 among the best-reviewed entries in the entire series. Some critics have even called it the best Toy Story film yet, praising its balancing act between the toy and human characters. Now, I would not go quite that far, since the emotional gut-punches of Toy Story 3 remain in a class of their own, but the fact that the conversation is even happening tells you how thoroughly Toy Story 5 exceeds the low expectations many of us brought to it. This is not a cash grab. It is a worthy continuation, and that is the highest compliment I can pay a fifth film in a beloved series.
Thirty Years in the Toy Box
It is worth stepping back to appreciate what Toy Story 5 is building on, because no animated franchise in history carries this kind of weight. The original Toy Story arrived in 1995 as the first fully computer-animated feature film ever made, a genuine watershed that did not just launch Pixar but effectively invented the modern animation era. The films that followed became cultural touchstones for an entire generation, and the series has always been unusually attuned to the passage of time, with its audience literally growing up alongside Andy and then Bonnie. Part of why Toy Story 5 lands so hard is that the people who saw the first film as children are now bringing their own kids to this one, and the franchise has always understood and exploited that generational continuity better than any of its peers.
That history raises the degree of difficulty enormously. Every new Toy Story film is measured not only against current animated competition but against three decades of accumulated affection and some of the most beloved endings in the medium. Toy Story 5 had to honor all of that while still feeling necessary, and the remarkable thing is how lightly it carries the burden. The film never feels crushed by its own legacy or desperate to remind you of past glories. It trusts that these characters and their world are strong enough to support a new story, and that confidence pays off. There is a real maturity in the way Toy Story 5 acknowledges its history without being imprisoned by it, and it is a big part of why the film works as well as it does.
A Record-Breaking Opening and a Taylor Swift Assist
It would be impossible to review Toy Story 5 without noting the cultural and commercial phenomenon it has already become, because the film’s opening is the stuff of box office history. Toy Story 5 debuted to a staggering $160 million domestically and $152 million internationally, for a global opening weekend of $312 million. That figure represents the biggest opening in the history of both the Toy Story franchise and Pixar itself, surpassing the previous records held by Toy Story 4 and Inside Out 2, and it stands as the largest debut of 2026 to date. The film earned $71 million on its first day alone, with $17.5 million in Thursday previews, the best preview performance of the year.
Part of that cultural saturation comes from an unexpected source. Taylor Swift contributed an original song to Toy Story 5, titled “I Knew It, I Knew You,” which she wrote and produced with Jack Antonoff. Released in early June ahead of the film, the song shot to number one on the Billboard Global 200, becoming the first number-one song on that chart for both Disney and Pixar. Whatever you think of the strategy, it worked, helping turn Toy Story 5 into an event that transcended the usual family-film audience. The film has also been credited as part of the broader theatrical comeback of 2026, a summer that is tracking well ahead of recent years, and its success is being read across the industry as proof that families will still turn out in force for the right movie on the big screen. For all the film’s thematic worry about screens replacing communal experiences, there is something fitting about Toy Story 5 packing theaters and reminding everyone why the shared big-screen experience still matters.
Film Specifications
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Film Title | Toy Story 5 |
| Year | 2026 |
| Director | Andrew Stanton |
| Co-Director | McKenna Harris |
| Screenplay | Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris (story by Andrew Stanton) |
| Studio | Pixar Animation Studios / Walt Disney Pictures |
| Voice Cast | Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Greta Lee, Conan O’Brien, Tony Hale, Ernie Hudson, Scarlett Spears |
| Music | Randy Newman |
| Original Song | “I Knew It, I Knew You” by Taylor Swift |
| Runtime | Approximately 100 minutes |
| Rating | PG (for some thematic elements and rude humor) |
| Budget | $250 million |
| World Premiere | June 9, 2026 (Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles) |
| US Release Date | June 19, 2026 |
| Theaters | 4,425 (including IMAX and premium large format) |
| Distributor | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures |
Should You See Toy Story 5? The Final Word
Toy Story 5 is the sequel nobody asked for and, it turns out, the one a lot of us needed, a smart, funny, emotionally resonant film that proves this thirty-year-old franchise still has something meaningful to say. By turning its lens on the screen-saturated reality of modern childhood, Toy Story 5 finds genuinely fresh territory in a series many of us assumed was finished, and it explores that territory with the wit, warmth, and craft that defines Pixar at its best. Andrew Stanton has delivered a film that honors everything we love about Woody, Buzz, and Jessie while saying something true and timely about the world today’s kids are growing up in.
Is it the best Toy Story film ever made? I will leave that argument to the internet, though the fact that it is even debatable is remarkable for a fifth installment. What I can say without hesitation is that Toy Story 5 is a wonderful time at the movies, the kind of film that works for kids and adults on completely different levels, sends everyone home happy, and reminds you why these characters have endured for three decades. The record-shattering box office and the glowing reviews are well earned. If you have any affection for this franchise, or you simply want to give your family one of the best moviegoing experiences of the summer, Toy Story 5 is playing now, and it is absolutely worth the price of a ticket. See it on the biggest screen you can, and bring tissues just in case. Pixar still knows exactly what it is doing.
Toy Story 5 (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Pixar) | PG | approximately 100 minutes | Released June 19, 2026
