{
  "type": "article",
  "title": "Toy Story 5 Review: Screens Are the New Villain, and Jessie Finally Takes the Lead",
  "summary": "In Pixar's fifth Toy Story, the toys' real enemy is screen time, and for the first time the story is carried by Jessie rather than the Woody and Buzz double-act. It is funny and deeply moving, even if its final message turns out unexpectedly gentle.",
  "content": "Pixar's Toy Story films have always lived comfortably with longing and quiet sadness, and the reason is built into the toys themselves. Their time is short and their value is fleeting. Even if a cowboy doll is not pushed aside by a spaceman, the simple arrival of adolescence and adulthood will eventually make him obsolete, no matter how hard he works to charm and amuse. The first three films taught us that the labour still matters even when the love does not last, while the fourth chapter struggled to land a theme of equal weight. This new outing, though, is a happy return to that philosophical form, and it is also funny, warm and, to a large and perhaps excessive degree, optimistic.\n\nThis time the threat is the screen\n\nThe challenge now facing the toys, as director and writer Andrew Stanton and co-director and co-screenwriter Kenna Harris make plain, is an existential one. Screen time threatens to swallow everything. It does not merely eat into hours that would once have gone to physical playthings, it could replace imaginative play altogether with structured games. Even the gang's owner, Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), is not safe from the pull when she receives a new Lilypad tablet, voiced by Greta Lee.\n\nThis newcomer is supremely sure she can connect Bonnie with the new friends the lonely girl so badly needs. Jessie (Joan Cusack), who now heads the gang because Woody (Tom Hanks) left in the previous film to rescue abandoned toys, is far from convinced. Suspicious of this high-tech intruder, just as Woody once was, she hatches her own plans for Bonnie. Sadly, her efforts to help end up cutting her off from her own crew and force her to face her buried fear of being abandoned, while Buzz (Tim Allen) and the others set off to bring her home.\n\nNot one Buzz, but a whole raft of them\n\nPerhaps that should read Buzzes, because the film's most enjoyable side story sees a whole raft of brand-new Buzz Lightyear toys washed off a container ship and into the sea, setting out to reach \"Space Command\" and civilisation. Amusingly, the in-universe version of the franchise appears to be faring rather better than Lightyear did. For much of the running time these adventures stay an unconnected counterpoint to the main plot, yet they deliver far more than their share of the laughs. Among the other new arrivals are the abandoned toys Jessie meets, led by Conan O'Brien's 'Smarty Pants', a potty-training tech device shaped like a toilet roll that will delight the more scatologically inclined corner of the audience.\n\nJessie steps into the spotlight\n\nThe real lead this time, however, is Jessie, finally taking the reins from the Woody and Buzz double-act. Cusack's character has been a dependable sidekick across three films, but this story reaches back into that 'When She Loved Me'-scored montage from Toy Story 2 that revealed the loss of her first owner and the lasting trauma it left behind. There was not a dry eye in the house for that sequence, and here Randy Newman's score keeps returning to the melody of that Sarah McLachlan tearjerker to pull hard at the heartstrings as Jessie panics over this latest rejection.\n\nAnger at technology, softened into a mild verdict\n\nYou could detect a hint of old man yells at cloud in the studio's portrait of a nightmare world where everyone is permanently on their screens and therefore cut off from one another. They are not wrong, of course, to name technology as a driver of human loneliness and a drain on creativity. What is more surprising is the deeply moderate place they finally arrive at. Screen time, the film suggests, can be useful as one part of a balanced diet of leisure, which is something any thoughtful parent could have pointed out from the start.\n\nIt is remarkably gentle, especially from a studio that has historically argued, story after story, for the power and even the primacy of human creativity. That said, it feels less surprising once you remember that this studio shares a founder with Apple and a home with the tech world in the Bay Area. Their conclusion is reasonable and sensible, carrying only a faint edge of dewy-eyed hope, but you have to search very hard to find the radical streak and simmering rage of WALL•E or The Incredibles beneath this final act. Perhaps it hides in a throwaway line about how long tech toys are likely to last, or in the way the film retroactively lends more force to the previous one. Read between the lines and an entire generation of toys will soon need the rescue service run by Woody and Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves, billed fifth-from-last), and that is a gloomy thought indeed. For now, though, one little girl and her cowgirl doll find a way through, and there is comfort in that for all of us.\n\nOn the whole, it is as funny and charming as the first three films.\n\nWhat this means for you\n• For viewers: For Toy Story fans and families this is a funny, emotional new chapter where Jessie takes centre stage and the story turns on screen time versus real, imaginative play.\n• For parents: The film lands on the message that screen time is fine as part of a balanced mix of leisure, a useful takeaway about managing kids' digital habits.\n\nQuestions & Answers\n\n1. Who is the main character in Toy Story 5?\nThis time the story is led by Jessie (Joan Cusack), who takes over from the Woody and Buzz double-act.\n\n2. What is the film's central conflict about?\nThe toys now face the threat of screen time, especially after Bonnie gets a new Lilypad tablet voiced by Greta Lee.\n\n3. Where is Woody in this film?\nWoody (Tom Hanks) left in the previous film to rescue abandoned toys, so Jessie now leads the gang.\n\n4. Who directed the movie?\nIt is directed and written by Andrew Stanton, with Kenna Harris as co-director and co-screenwriter.",
  "url": "https://trendkia.com/en/movie-review/toy-story-5-rivyu-skrina-ki-duniya-se-takarate-khilaune-aura-jesi-ka-dila-chhu-l-1302",
  "category": "Movie Reviews",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-16",
  "tags": [
    "Toy Story 5",
    "Pixar",
    "animated film review",
    "Andrew Stanton",
    "Jessie",
    "screen time",
    "Buzz Lightyear",
    "Hollywood film"
  ],
  "language": "en",
  "site": "TrendKia"
}