Toy Story 5

 

It’s been 30 years, yes, 30, since Pixar took the world by storm with the original Toy Story the first fully digitally animated film. This week, Disney/Pixar returned to the franchise and released its fourth sequel, Toy Story 5. 

Normally, I’d be waiting with bated breath to check this one out, but really not liking the fourth film I went into this one with a great deal of apprehension and only a modicum of hope for a better viewer experience. Something I was seriously doubting when the woman next to me only stopped talking when the movie began because texting and scrolling through her phone was her new priority. 

Absolutely fitting given the tech takeover theme of the movie. She totally missed that part by the way.

Anywho. 

Moving on.

Overall, at the end of the day, I found Toy Story 5 more enjoyable film than Toy Story 4 but it’s still a pale comparison to 1 - 3. TS5, is a course correction for certain. There’s a concerted attempt to recapture the spirit, themes, relationships, and heart of the first three films while still building on those introduced in the fourth. The effort is a bit of a mixed bad but succeeds more than it fails.

The first third of the film is a bit mid and while nostalgia carries you through the story lays there and I found myself waiting for something to really cling to and get me invested. Thankfully the film slowly but surely gets better and more engaging around the halfway mark and finished fairly strong.

Unlike any of the previous films, Toy Story 5 switches focus and is all about Jessie reducing everyone else to supporting characters. While it’s comforting to see so many aspects of Jessie’s story retold, it feels a bit unnecessary to rehash so much from such a well-developed character and doesn’t leave much room for more growth. 

In fact, once again, most of the characters are done dirty having lost the growth they’ve gained in previous films, getting glossed over, underutilized, or rendered inconsequential in order to drive the plot in a lazy, contrived, instead of organic way. 

One of the driving tenets of Pixar over the years which has made many of their films so beloved was the basic story above all storytelling. First and foremost, everything served the story, moved it forward, was true to the characters. Toy Story 5 feels like someone missed or ignored that memo. Lots of scenes/aspects of the film are fun, cute, enjoyable individually, but really don’t serve the film in its entirety beyond easy plot devices or something fun, cute, and enjoyable yet irrelevant to the story.

I think that’s the biggest issue for this film across the board. There isn’t much here that we haven’t seen and felt in previous films that was done with better execution, heart, and emotion.

Toy Story 5 is a beautifully animated, visually stunning, hit and miss humorous, muddle that will make you smile, overall entertains, but will have you wanting to rewatch the original trilogy more than anything else. It's not a bad film, but it's one that definitely makes me wish they'd had stopped the sequels when they originally intended and that they don't feel the need to make any more.

I’ve been flip flopping on rating this one for over 24 hours now and am still largely undecided. However, I don't want to put any more thought into it so I’m giving Toy Story 5 an unsettled 6.5 - 7. Probably a higher rating than I should, but I’m going with emotion over reason today.

#ToyStory5