102 min | G | June 19, 2026 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Pixar returns to the well a fifth time and the well is not dry. The threat this time is not abandonment. It is a screen.
Pixar comes back to these characters a fifth time and finds something new to be afraid of. Toy Story 5 picks up two years after the toys found new life with Bonnie. The danger is not a rival toy or a trip to the dump. It is Lilypad, a frog-shaped smart tablet that talks back, teaches, entertains, and never needs to be put away. Woody and Buzz and Jessie watch their kid drift toward a device that does everything a toy does and more. Andrew Stanton builds the film around a question every parent in the audience already lives with. What happens to play when the toy is also the babysitter. The premise sounds like a lecture. It plays like a story.
Tom Hanks returns as Woody with the weary decency the character has carried for three decades. Tim Allen plays Buzz with the same earnest bravado. Joan Cusack gives Jessie real urgency as the toy who sees the threat clearest. Greta Lee voices Lilypad, and the casting is the film’s smartest move. Lilypad is never a cackling villain. Lee plays her as helpful, reasonable, and relentlessly available, which is exactly what makes her dangerous. Conan O’Brien steals scenes as Smarty Pants, a toilet-training gadget whose deadpan delivery lands every joke. The ensemble works because nobody coasts on nostalgia.
Stanton directed Finding Nemo and WALL-E and he understands how to wring feeling from non-human characters. He co-wrote the screenplay with McKenna Harris and the structure is airtight. Every act earns the next. Randy Newman returns for his tenth Pixar score and the music does what it always does, carrying emotion without announcing itself. The animation is the expected technical marvel, but the real craft is in restraint. The film does not overstuff itself with new characters or set pieces. It picks one idea and follows it all the way down.
This is Pixar operating at full strength. The film is genuinely kid-friendly without ever talking down, and it hands the adults a fear they recognize. The toys are not fighting a monster. They are fighting obsolescence in the form of something genuinely useful. That is the trick of the whole franchise. It takes the anxieties grown-ups cannot say out loud and gives them to a cowboy doll and a space ranger. Five films in, the studio still knows exactly what it is doing. The kid will grow up. The screen will win some days. The toys keep showing up anyway.