Toys, Tech, and Growing Up: "Toy Story 5" Takes on the iPad Babies

It’s Toys VS Tech in Pixar’s latest entry in the Toy Story franchise! Jessie, Buzz, Woody, and the rest of Bonnie’s toys (as well as some new friends) come face to face with the monster that is “killing childhood” in the eyes of many parents: The Internet. But can the series that debuted the CG animated feature to the world take on the “IPad babies” of Gen Alpha without coming off as curmudgeonly? Or is this Toy Story truly out of touch?

While the original 3 films of the Toy Story franchise are almost universally beloved, some of the fourth entry’s detractors consider that the decision to continue the story as misguided, owing to the “perfect conclusion” that some consider the third film to be. Others considered Woody’s decision to strike out on his own a betrayal of his own (and the series at large’s) values. I personally had a more pedantic reason to dislike the series’s revival: Forky. 

For a brief moment in the early to mid 2010’s, DIY toys made out of cardboard tubes and other pieces of “trash” material were the latest trend in children’s entertainment. While making toys out of trash is a practice as old as the very concept of a toy, this particular fad among largely coastal Americans died out after just a few years. The truth is, most American kids would prefer a heavily advertised, manufactured toy, to a sheet of corrugated cardboard and some plastic utensils. Despite this, Disney saw the trend and ran with it as the brave new idea to revive their flagship franchise with, totally ignoring the now long-emerging threat to “classic styles of play” for children - electronic devices and the Internet. 

Though Toy Story 5 chooses not to retcon it’s semi-controversial predecessor (and makes an effort to include Forky in its recurring gags), it feels more like a spiritual sequel to Toy Story 2. This is largely due to Jessie taking the spotlight from Woody as the protagonist. If Toy Story 4 was the next stage of Woody and Bo Peep’s story from the original 1995 film, Toy Story 5 is the next stage of Jessie and Buzz’s from its sequel. Not only does the film feature several callbacks and references to both characters’ backstories, but much of the screen time is spent with specifically them, as opposed to Woody or the other franchise mainstays. However, the real meat and potatoes of Toy Story 5 is not in its characters or nostalgia bait, but in its approach to handling the Toys VS Tech conversation. I expected this film to take a very paternalistic “smart phone bad” angle, and while it does spend some time espousing the horrors of too much screen time and online bullying, it ultimately accepts the very nuanced position that most families have come to accept: the line between Tech and Toy is finer than we think, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Though this outlook is primarily enforced through the film’s villain, a frog themed tablet called Lilypad, it is also illustrated by Buzz’s interaction with a legion of his high tech descendants/replacements, and Jessie’s adversarial but ultimately enlightening relationship with a child’s digital camera, a hippo themed 2000’s GPS, and a wifi enabled Potty Training device voiced by the great Conan O’Brien. All of these devices are anthropomorphized in the same way as toys, and while they posses many more abilities than your average toy, as Jessie comes to find, they can still be played with in the traditional way. What Toy Story 5 rages at, ultimately, is not the idea of children having access to technology, but the idea that once they have it, they don’t have to dream anymore. When games are concretely defined by programming parameters, when communication is instantaneous but remote, and when attachment to the screen starts to eclipse attachment to the physical world around them, that is when technology is problematic, but tech can also be used to connect with friends far away, add a soundtrack to make believe sessions, or even to experiment with the art of moviemaking. Having grown up early enough to remember getting rid of my VHS tapes but late enough to have had game consoles and my own Ipod Touch by age 10. I have many fond memories of this style of “integrated play”, like shooting short films of my friends having nerf battles, stop motion animating my action figures, and playing “Toys to life” style games like the Skylanders series or Disney’s own Disney Infinity. The idea that my childhood would have been better without tech is laughable, but the truth is that without supervision or limits, too much tech exposure can mature kids in a way that is detrimental to proper emotional growth.

In taking a nuanced position, Toy Story 5 does a lot to ingratiate itself with both older and younger audiences. The series’s characters may all decry tech as the very thing that is killing play, but when it comes down to it, they are all willing to embrace technology as a fact of life so long as it can provide genuine happiness and connection to the child that they’ve sworn to steward and protect. It doesn’t hurt that the legion of  high tech Buzz Lightyears and their quest to attain sentience and a meeting with the fabled “star command” stands out as one of Pixar’s most entertaining and compelling gags from the last decade. Frankly, I would watch an entire movie about these little guys continuing their adventure of self discovery. If anyone at Disney or Pixar is reading, I am being dead serious about this.

Toy Story 5’s best moments are fairly evenly split between exploring new concepts and retreading nostalgic ground, which in my mind, indicates that they’ve still got the chops required to squeeze another movie or two out of this aging franchise. While I can’t say that I’m necessarily excited for more toy stories, I’m sure there are tons of kids out there who will be after leaving the theater. Our toys may change and our stories may evolve, but as long as there are kids in this world, there will always be room to tell Toy Stories.