Happy Summer from HotS! Toy Story 5 picks up where the disastrous Lightyear left off, milking a beloved and innovative franchise for all its worth even as its aging ensemble die off in the real world. Spoilers are going to be mildly useful here, but it’s important from the outset to admit that the gremlins have been quoting the trailer for this movie for approximately two weeks almost verbatim, so there is obviously some fun writing for two subhumans with a vague memory of the first four movies which we spedrun through one weekend on a vacation at some point. This movie opens with a fairly anodyne gambit, the introduction of the least offensive-looking “device” that one could acquire for their child, and suggests that this marks a significant cultural shift away from (and existential threat to) toys.
Anyone who is familiar with the franchise knows that this is pretty dicey territory to pick for yourself: since the 90s, Rex has been a connoisseur of video games, the boogeyman threatening to disrupt the pristine childhood of a generation of kids three decades ago, and Ham is wont to watch his fair share of television commercials–one of the four horsemen threatening innocent toy-playing childhood–in Toy Story 2. Andy’s toys are no strangers to technology and the way that they can be useful tools for entertainment or moving the plot along, so the notion that Lilypad would pose such a threat to them seems a little shrill.
AV Club makes the comparison to Inside Out in its review of the movie in the “spotlighting of a child,” but there are also ways in which its potempkin villain Lilypad is set up to be reintegrated back into the core group much like Gabby Gabby in TS 4 and Lotso in TS 3 and the Prospector in TS 2, but also like Anxiety in Inside Out 2. In some ways, the reveal of Other Kids being the true villain takes us back to the most enigmatic and cruel villain of the series, Andy’s next door neighbor Sid. And much like the original movie, Toy Story 5 also doesn’t have a cohesive answer for how to overcome the cruelty of elementary-aged girls on the internet (hence the Taylor Swift song). Instead, her well-meaning parents blunder around inconsistently enforced screentime and parental settings before positing that an apparent age gap friendship among two like-minded weirdos might do the trick, which is the real bind, isn’t it?
Olivia Laing in her book The Lonely City, a meditation on how loneliness affected some of the great American artists of the 20th century and their work, talks about the way that the feeling of loneliness is so impossibly difficult to extricate oneself from, the way that its recognition in others signals a fight or flight in the very people who would be equipped to disarm it, and how once you are no longer lonely, you brain literally blocks off your memory of that painful experience, rendering you unhelpful and unable to share your wisdom with others less fortunate. Bonnie’s experiences of loneliness in Toy Story 5 are excellent and at times subtle depictions of the ineffable cruelty of childhood, the common feeling of speechlessness, of the impossibility of verbalizing one’s feelings even despite being able to recognize something wrong or unfair.
Vulture has an intriguing take in “Toy Story 5 is Secretly a Period Piece,” arguing that the end of the “age of toys” happened long ago, noting no time has passed since we left Bonnie on the steps of her house with Woody and Buzz as Andy drives off to the big college in the sky. I’m really intrigued by that idea of this movie not really able to swallow the entire elephant of what it’s talking about.
The trailers for not one but two original Pixar films in the next year coupled with the trailer from Laika’s Wildwood and the long-awaited Cat in the Hat and Coyote vs Acme makes me and the gremlins so excited for the second half of this year’s kids movies.
