Official Trailer
Rating: 0/10 | Genre: Animation, Family, Comedy, Adventure | Runtime: 102 min
Starring: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Greta Lee, Conan O'Brien
I took my kids to see Toy Story 5 yesterday and I’m still trying to figure out what I just watched. Not in a good way.
Look, I’ve been a fan of this franchise since the beginning. The original Toy Story blew my mind in 1995. Even Toy Story 3 made me cry like a baby. But this one? This one feels like Pixar just went through the motions.
The setup is fine. Bonnie gets a Lilypad tablet for her birthday and suddenly she’s glued to it. Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and the gang have to deal with the fact that their kid doesn’t want to play with them anymore. It’s actually a pretty relevant problem for 2026. Kids are on screens all the time. I get why they went there.
But here’s where it falls apart. The movie spends way too much time explaining the problem and not enough time actually solving it. We get it. Tablets are the enemy of imagination. We’ve heard this message a thousand times. The pacing drags in the middle section where they’re just kind of hanging around the room complaining about being ignored.
The new characters don’t help. Conan O’Brien voices some kind of smart home device that tries to be funny and just isn’t. His jokes landed with exactly three laughs from the entire theater. Greta Lee plays a new character I honestly can’t remember much about. She felt unnecessary.
Tom Hanks and Tim Allen still have chemistry as Woody and Buzz, but they’re not given much to do that we haven’t seen before. The whole thing feels like they were going through a checklist instead of telling an actual story. Where’s the heart? Where’s the moment that makes you feel something?
Joan Cusack as Jessie is good as always, but even she can’t save this. The animation looks great obviously. That’s not the problem. The problem is the script feels like it was written by someone who remembered what Toy Story used to be but forgot why people loved it in the first place.
My six year old liked it fine. She laughed at some parts. But my nine year old was bored halfway through and honestly I didn’t blame her. At 102 minutes it felt like two hours.
If you’ve got young kids and nothing else to do on a weekend, sure, take them. They’ll probably be entertained enough. But don’t expect this to be a movie you’ll want to rewatch with them. It’s just not there. This feels more like a cash grab than a real Toy Story movie, and that’s disappointing coming from Pixar.
Have you seen it yet? Did it work better for you than it did for me?
Where to Watch
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