The new Disney-Pixar movie Toy Story 5 is less a cartoon than a brief for better parenting practices, and those parenting practices include children hanging onto their toys for as long as possible. Forget books, forget concerts, forget free play: the secret to raising a well-adjusted child is having lots of plastic action figures and worn ragdolls around the house. Or so say the moviemakers.
What’s more, the movie — the latest in a depressing succession of sequels to the admittedly clever 1995 feature Toy Story — asks the audience to make fine distinctions between old-fashioned, analog toys that depend on their owner’s imagination and high-tech devices that induce their users to tap and scroll in a state of zombielike stupefaction. Let’s set aside that this argument, so far as it goes, is correct. It is certainly encouraging that Hollywood, itself increasingly dependent on streaming, would mount a case against the ubiquity of screens in the modern American childhood. Yet there is something distressingly childlike itself about the argument: To contend that one species of toys is superior to the other, while conceivably accurate and in this case actually accurate, is also to oversell the importance of toys, any toys, in the scheme of life.
Pardon me for sounding like the Grinch, to mix my cartoon metaphors, but if a film critic doesn’t take the Toy Story series seriously, who will?
If Toy Story 5 were aimed mainly at children, this would be of little consequence, but the movie clearly wants to appeal to the sentiments of those responsible for buying tickets — the parents. Furthermore, if high-tech devices are truly as omnipresent among the young as the movie posits, then the only demographic that would look nostalgically upon the cast-off old-time toys are those who remember them: again, the parents. And without doubting the ongoing popularity of Toy Story and its sequels, the group most likely to look with special fondness upon Sheriff Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and the like are those who saw the first movie 31 years ago — once again, the parents. Is it altogether healthy for those with mortgages and jobs to wallow in nostalgia for toys?
I will return to that larger, philosophical question later. The more urgent question is whether or not Toy Story 5 is worth seeing, either for children or their minders. Unfortunately, while there are presumably less diverting ways to spend close to two hours in a stuffy, packed multiplex, the movie is a preachy, one-note affair. From virtually the first frames, director Andrew Stanton is preoccupied with illustrating the melancholic condition of toys that have been consigned to the ash heap of history, or, at least, of childhood.
An early scene shows an entire island on which “high-tech editions” of Buzz Lightyears have been cruelly deposited — a kind of landfill for one particular product line. Meanwhile, a flashback, set vaguely in the Before Times, presents a girl playing with the ragdoll Jessie, a cowgirl and aspirant sheriff, voiced enthusiastically and most capably by Joan Cusack. The girl promises never to forsake her toy, but as she grows up, that is exactly what happens. Of course, this is no tragedy — there comes a time to put away childish things, 40-something video-gamers notwithstanding — but the movie comes close to regarding it as such.
In time, Jessie has passed into the possession of another girl, Bonnie (the voice of Scarlett Spears), who is the right age to appreciate the ragdoll but who links her loneliness with her attachment to her toys. For their part, her next-door neighbors, to whom she is afraid to speak, have dumped their outdated toys in their cluttered side yard while they occupy their eyeballs with devices, notably, the film’s fictitious Lilypad (the voice of Greta Lee), which merges the worst aspects of computer “games” with the worst aspects of social media. “Why, they’re both just sittin’ there, doin’ nothing,” Jessie laments to her fellow discarded toys.
In a notably ill-advised move, Bonnie’s parents plunk down cash for a Lilypad for Bonnie, who finds texting a convenient means to make “friends,” but these “friends” prove fickle when Jessie and toy horse, Bullseye, come along for a play date. “Oh, you still play with toys,” one of a trio of screen-addicted children says to Bonnie. Thus disinvited, the toys eventually find themselves having been conveyed to a ranch occupied by a horse, a pig, and a new cadre of humans, including a girl seemingly more receptive to nonelectronic toys, Blaze (the voice of Mykal-Michelle Harris), who, promisingly, has a shelfful of horse figurines.
REVIEWED: STEVEN SPIELBERG’S ‘DISCLOSURE DAY’
Naturally, we are meant to take the side of Bonnie and her toys when it comes to their casual displacement in favor of high-tech devices, but the toys themselves are hardly a disinterested party. For her part, Jessie — that’s the cowgirl ragdoll, for those having trouble keeping track — goes on and on about the importance of toys in the emotional and creative lives of children, but she resents it when those same children outgrow their various action figures, trinkets, and doodads. So does the movie. This is clear since, eventually, Lilypad itself (herself?) is conscripted in an effort to form a friendship between Bonnie and Blaze. As it turns out, the movie is not even sincere in its argument against electronic junk.
There I go again — mounting a philosophical case against a cartoon. Yes, the movie is brightly designed and ingeniously animated. And yes, it is rather fun to again hear the voices of Tom Hanks as Woody and Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear, even if their much-reduced roles have a certain obligatory quality. The dialogue, on the whole, is a degree or two smarter than comparable animated productions. When Jessie says expressions such as “holy butterscotch” or “Cheese and crackers, what are you doing?” only a complete sourpuss would fail to smile. Yet this is still a movie that favors infantilism. Toy Story 5 wishes to keep children in a state of dependency on their toys, just as the franchise itself seeks to keep its aging viewership in a state of perpetual nostalgia. Yes, real toys are better than high-tech devices, but both are poor substitutes for growing up. Here’s my advice: Bonnie should put away both Jessie and Bullseye, and throw away Lilypad, and read Black Beauty instead.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.