'Toy Story 5' Review: A Heartfelt Return to Childhood

The film opens on Bonnie’s birthday. Among the usual presents is a sleek, unassuming Lilypad tablet (voiced with slick, corporate warmth by Greta Lee). Bonnie is instantly captivated. She swipes. She taps. She plays an educational logic game called Smarty Pants (hosted by a manic, self-satisfied Conan O’Brien). Woody, Buzz, and the gang watch, horrified, as their child’s attention span evaporates. When Bonnie leaves the room, the toys discover that the tablet has a secret life: inside its glowing screen lives a regimented army of app mascots - including the breathlessly anxious Smarty Pants, a reluctant GPS orb named Atlas (Craig Robinson), and the aggressively chirpy photo-editing filter Snappy (Shelby Rabara). These digital denizens believe they are the future of play. They have no strings, no fluff, no need for imagination. The toys must infiltrate the tablet’s inner world - a sleek, pixelated realm of endless notifications and leaderboards - to remind Bonnie (and, by extension, us) that play is about messy, tactile creativity, not optimized screen time.

Stanton and his team understand something crucial: a villain doesn’t have to be evil to be effective. The Lilypad OS isn’t malicious - it’s efficient. It gamifies everything, promising rewards for attention. This philosophical clash is the film’s strongest asset. The visual contrast is stunning: the toys’ warm, textured, hand-crafted world versus the cold, crisp, infinite scrolling of the tablet’s interface. Watching Woody try to reason with Smarty Pants - a character who can only speak in clickbait headlines and leaderboard rankings - is both hilarious and a little unsettling.

The voice work is uniformly excellent. Tom Hanks keeps finding new shades of weary earnestness in Woody, while Tim Allen’s Buzz gets a subplot about learning to “swipe” with his plastic fingers that is genuinely funny. Tony Hale’s Forky remains a scene-stealer, his existential confusion now expanding to encompass the horror of autocorrect. The MVP, however, is Conan O’Brien. His Smarty Pants is a frantic, grinning machine of empty positivity, a perfect parody of edutainment apps that promise to make your child smarter while actually just trapping them in a dopamine loop. His big musical number, “You Solved It! (Now Look at This Ad),” is a callback to classic Pixar spectacle, but with a venomous satirical edge.

The middle act, where the toys shrink themselves into the tablet’s processor, is a masterclass in visual storytelling. It feels like Tron rendered by the Pixar team - ancient cartridges look like cathedrals, and long-deleted files roam the memory banks like ghosts. But the film runs into trouble when it has to resolve its central tension. The climax, involving a literal “delete all data” countdown, feels like a standard stakes-raiser that doesn’t quite match the nuanced setup. The solution - Bonnie simply choosing to play with her toys again - is sweet but simplistic, sidestepping the harder question of how parents and children actually navigate screen-based lives. It wraps up with a hug and a craft project, which is lovely, but a bit of a cop-out.

Pros

• Greta Lee and Conan O’Brien deliver standout voice performances, with O’Brien’s Smarty Pants being an instant classic Pixar antagonist.
• The visual design of the digital world is inventive, tactile, and a feast for the eyes in IMAX.
• The core premise - screen addiction versus unstructured play - is timely and handled with more subtlety than expected for a family film.
• Forky’s continued existential dread remains a reliable source of high-concept comedy.

Cons

• The third act devolves into a generic “race against the countdown” climax that feels less clever than the setup.
• Some original cast members (like the Toy Story 4 additions of Gabby Gabby and Duke Caboom) are missing without explanation, creating an uneven roster.
• The ending resolves the central conflict too neatly, avoiding the messier realities of modern parenting and tech use.
• At 102 minutes, it feels slightly overstuffed, with a few recycling-themed side characters who don’t get enough room to shine.

Toy Story 5 is a confident, visually sumptuous sequel that earns its place in the lineup - mostly. It understands that the real enemy isn’t a new toy, but a new behavior. While it pulls its punches in the final reel, the journey through the slick, treacherous world of app-land is a joy. It’s not the best Toy Story film, but it’s the most necessary one we’ve gotten since the third. For anyone who’s ever watched a child stare blankly at a glowing screen, it will feel uncomfortably familiar. For everyone else, it’s a fun, frantic, and surprisingly thoughtful reminder that the best play doesn’t require a charge. The button awaits. And if you’re reading this review on your phone… maybe put it down and go find a box of crayons.