The Secrets of Toy Story 5

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SCR203: Pixar handed Bonnie a tablet and then refused to make it the bad guy. That one choice is what this Toy Story 5 conversation keeps circling back to.

Jeff Haecker, Tom Grelinger, and Patrick Mason work through the fifth Toy Story film, in which an 8-year-old Bonnie gets a frog-shaped tablet named Lilypad and gradually stops playing with the toys she inherited from Andy. Jessie and Bullseye stow away to a sleepover, get sent home, and wind up at the house where Jessie’s first owner Emily grew up. What Jessie finds there closes a backstory Pixar left half-finished in Toy Story 2.

The three of them spend real time on whether the screen-time message actually lands. Tom watched it twice and changed his mind. The first viewing read like Pixar shrugging and conceding that screens have won. The second read as something more careful, with technology working as a tool: it carries the message that reconnects two lonely kids, and it plays the organ at the toy wedding.

Patrick points to the scene that sold him. Bonnie comes home from the sleepover wrung out, because the other girls started a game of hide-and-seek and then went back to their tablets without ever finding her. He’s watched his own kids come home from exactly that, and watched them have a far better time when the screens get put away.

Then the film grows teeth. Bonnie’s message gets picked apart in the group chat, the pile-on is instant, and her parents scroll back through the whole thread and shut it down. Tom’s verdict: that’s the right answer, and the sound of a parent thumbing back through a kid’s messages is uncomfortably well observed.

Also on the table: why Jessie taking the lead from Woody and Buzz reads as a handoff instead of a benching, the Buzz Lightyear squad washing ashore as an opening B plot (Patrick spent the scene waiting for a Wilson volleyball), Combat Carl’s recast to Ernie Hudson after Carl Weathers’ death, the Potato Head recastings, and a mid-credits Zurg tease. Tom connects the film’s ending to Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, and its argument that technology has to serve the dignity of the person.

The verdict: Tom calls it fresh for a franchise that started in 1995, and better than Toy Story 4. Patrick ranks it second best of the five, behind the original. Jeff misses Andy’s old toys, most of whom spend the movie in a garage box, but agrees the handoff works.

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