This franchise is getting a little long in the tooth and it's probably time to wave goodbye to it, but darned if they didn't pull off another winner here -- in most ways, at least.
The movie is following the current Disney playbook rules, which state that the hero must always be a girl, in this case Jessie the cowgirl doll, voiced by Joan Cusack. The main human kid in the movie, Bonnie, has serious shyness issues and has trouble making friends...and this is where our story begins. Jessie and the other toys are hoping to encourage her to friend up with the twin boys across the street, but aren't having much success.
Toy_Story_5_Toy_Story_5_-_One_Sheet_Socials_Only.jpg
The other story element is that, no surprise, all the kids in the neighborhood except Bonnie are consumed with their "screens" and thus don't play with toys any more. (This would be news to my 8- and 6-year-old grand-nieces, who have enough toys to fill a garage and reportedly still play with all of them.) Bonnie's parents, who are desperate to help her get some friends, finally cave in and buy her a new screen of her own, LilyPad, a frog-shaped tablet device.
Lily is the resident bad guy of the story, even though she's also a girl, and (shades of the original movie) is not welcomed by all the more traditional toys. Nevertheless she starts taking over her kid's life, just like what happened to all the other kids in the neighborhood. When Lily finds out about the old toys' project of helping Bonnie make friends, she immediately sends out friend requests to several random kids, who of course turn out to be...the wrong kids, because they're all obsessed with screens too.
Some pretty tricky story gymnastics are played out as the movie unfolds, because Disney wisely realized that if the core message of the movie is that screens are bad for kids, that's going to have a negative impact on their bottom line, because the kids will be outside playing with toys and thus not becoming frequent watchers of Disney+. So the movie's villain must go through a redemption and save the day at the end, thereby implying that screens are only bad if they're mis-used. In the process, Jessie realizes that despite misgivings that she'd been a "bad toy," she really had a good impact on her owner; and Lily realizes she "picked the wrong friends" for Bonnie and agrees to help the rest of the toys by helping get Bonnie to bond with a new girl in town, Blaze, who also loves to play with toys.
Most of this takes place with much less help from the other toys from the previous movies. Jessie is joined by a bunch of more modern toys, the best of which is "Smarty Pants," a potty-training device voiced by Conan O'Brien. He has at least 90% of the funniest lines in the movie, and merits a re-watch just to catch all his rapid fire jokes, which of course are all potty-themed. Our old friend Tom Hanks is reduced to a supporting role -- Woody is in the story, but he doesn't even show up until about 35 minutes in.
Buzz Lightyear, on the other hand, is not only here, but there are about a hundred of him, thanks to a plane crash in which a bunch of Buzz Lightyears suddenly come to life and decide they need to "rendezvous with Star Command" and thus, use a bunch of random clues to wend their way across the planet, until they reach the original Buzz who -- shades of the original film -- has to convince them all they're not toys. (The fact that all Buzz Lightyears apparently come with a factory defect in which they don't know they're toys is pretty hilarious.) There's no mention of the fact that there are probably about a billion previously-owned Buzzes on the planet, and it's a mystery why all these brand new Buzzes seem compelled to find the original Buzz from Toy Story 1. But, like I said....gymnastics.
One thing I found kind of incredible was the fact that all those new Lightyears are the "high-tech version," which we don't know what that means at first, but eventually the original Buzz is "upgraded" to the new version by a download of new software. This gives him the ability to...wait for it....FLY, with the addition of drone-like blades. Well first of all, that's just stupid. You can't upgrade a toy to add new equipment to it with just a software download. Even a bunch of dumb toy-playing kids would know that. Second, the last scene in the movie shows dozens of the flying Buzz drones descending from on high, blades a-spinning, into the waiting arms (and fingers) of kids on the ground. Have these moviemakers never seen an actual drone? I thought the movie was going to turn into a Quentin Tarantino film for a minute, with everyone getting their fingers chopped off. But no, they all land safely, one of them declares "Mission accomplished!" and the wait begins for Toy Story 6.
The story, as goofy as it is, does tug at the heartstrings multiple times. Some pretty mature themes are explored, such as self-worth, the lure of being "part of the group," and the trauma that happens when a kid gets ridiculed by her peers. Parenting skills are even questioned. So I would have to give it a 3.5 out of 5 stars for having some brains (and assuming the audience has some, too) and not just being a maniacal kids movie, like the upcoming Minions one promises to be. People are seeming to really like it, with our crowd last night actually breaking into applause at the end.
Still, even though it's pretty good, the movie pales in comparison to the original Toy Story. The last 20 minutes of that film are one of my favorite sequences of any movie I've ever seen. Even Pixar itself has not been able to top that, although the storm scene in Ratatouille comes close.
The movie is following the current Disney playbook rules, which state that the hero must always be a girl, in this case Jessie the cowgirl doll, voiced by Joan Cusack. The main human kid in the movie, Bonnie, has serious shyness issues and has trouble making friends...and this is where our story begins. Jessie and the other toys are hoping to encourage her to friend up with the twin boys across the street, but aren't having much success.
Toy_Story_5_Toy_Story_5_-_One_Sheet_Socials_Only.jpg
The other story element is that, no surprise, all the kids in the neighborhood except Bonnie are consumed with their "screens" and thus don't play with toys any more. (This would be news to my 8- and 6-year-old grand-nieces, who have enough toys to fill a garage and reportedly still play with all of them.) Bonnie's parents, who are desperate to help her get some friends, finally cave in and buy her a new screen of her own, LilyPad, a frog-shaped tablet device.
Lily is the resident bad guy of the story, even though she's also a girl, and (shades of the original movie) is not welcomed by all the more traditional toys. Nevertheless she starts taking over her kid's life, just like what happened to all the other kids in the neighborhood. When Lily finds out about the old toys' project of helping Bonnie make friends, she immediately sends out friend requests to several random kids, who of course turn out to be...the wrong kids, because they're all obsessed with screens too.
Some pretty tricky story gymnastics are played out as the movie unfolds, because Disney wisely realized that if the core message of the movie is that screens are bad for kids, that's going to have a negative impact on their bottom line, because the kids will be outside playing with toys and thus not becoming frequent watchers of Disney+. So the movie's villain must go through a redemption and save the day at the end, thereby implying that screens are only bad if they're mis-used. In the process, Jessie realizes that despite misgivings that she'd been a "bad toy," she really had a good impact on her owner; and Lily realizes she "picked the wrong friends" for Bonnie and agrees to help the rest of the toys by helping get Bonnie to bond with a new girl in town, Blaze, who also loves to play with toys.
Most of this takes place with much less help from the other toys from the previous movies. Jessie is joined by a bunch of more modern toys, the best of which is "Smarty Pants," a potty-training device voiced by Conan O'Brien. He has at least 90% of the funniest lines in the movie, and merits a re-watch just to catch all his rapid fire jokes, which of course are all potty-themed. Our old friend Tom Hanks is reduced to a supporting role -- Woody is in the story, but he doesn't even show up until about 35 minutes in.
Buzz Lightyear, on the other hand, is not only here, but there are about a hundred of him, thanks to a plane crash in which a bunch of Buzz Lightyears suddenly come to life and decide they need to "rendezvous with Star Command" and thus, use a bunch of random clues to wend their way across the planet, until they reach the original Buzz who -- shades of the original film -- has to convince them all they're not toys. (The fact that all Buzz Lightyears apparently come with a factory defect in which they don't know they're toys is pretty hilarious.) There's no mention of the fact that there are probably about a billion previously-owned Buzzes on the planet, and it's a mystery why all these brand new Buzzes seem compelled to find the original Buzz from Toy Story 1. But, like I said....gymnastics.
One thing I found kind of incredible was the fact that all those new Lightyears are the "high-tech version," which we don't know what that means at first, but eventually the original Buzz is "upgraded" to the new version by a download of new software. This gives him the ability to...wait for it....FLY, with the addition of drone-like blades. Well first of all, that's just stupid. You can't upgrade a toy to add new equipment to it with just a software download. Even a bunch of dumb toy-playing kids would know that. Second, the last scene in the movie shows dozens of the flying Buzz drones descending from on high, blades a-spinning, into the waiting arms (and fingers) of kids on the ground. Have these moviemakers never seen an actual drone? I thought the movie was going to turn into a Quentin Tarantino film for a minute, with everyone getting their fingers chopped off. But no, they all land safely, one of them declares "Mission accomplished!" and the wait begins for Toy Story 6.
The story, as goofy as it is, does tug at the heartstrings multiple times. Some pretty mature themes are explored, such as self-worth, the lure of being "part of the group," and the trauma that happens when a kid gets ridiculed by her peers. Parenting skills are even questioned. So I would have to give it a 3.5 out of 5 stars for having some brains (and assuming the audience has some, too) and not just being a maniacal kids movie, like the upcoming Minions one promises to be. People are seeming to really like it, with our crowd last night actually breaking into applause at the end.
Still, even though it's pretty good, the movie pales in comparison to the original Toy Story. The last 20 minutes of that film are one of my favorite sequences of any movie I've ever seen. Even Pixar itself has not been able to top that, although the storm scene in Ratatouille comes close.