Pixar Toy Story 5 puts Greta Lee at the center as Lilypad, a creepy tablet that reshapes the toy world around Bonnie. review says the fifth Toy Story film turns that setup into a battle over kids, screens and imaginative play, but the emotional finish does not land cleanly.
Bonnie and Lilypad
Lilypad enters the children’s world as a sinister new device, and Bonnie is the first clear casualty of the film’s tech premise. She starts out thrilled because the tablet connects her with other girls, then gets pulled into cruelty and online bullying, which makes the story feel less like a toy adventure than a warning about how quickly a device can reorganize childhood social life.
Jessie, voiced by Joan Cusack, still belongs to Bonnie, while Buzz Lightyear and Woody return as the franchise’s old guard. Tim Allen voices Buzz and Tom Hanks voices Woody, with Woody living away from the others in a kind of feral outdoor existence alongside Bo Peep, voiced by Annie Potts.
Buzz, Woody and Jessie
The review says the film’s central conflict becomes a tech moral battle for Buzz, Woody and Jessie, but that struggle is compromised by the plot mechanics around it. Woody’s separation from the main group gives the movie a lonelier tone, and the franchise’s recurring attention to mortality sits underneath the action without fully solving the story’s bigger problem: how to keep the toys meaningful when the threat is a device designed to replace them.
Jessie also encounters Blaze, a horse lover and toy enthusiast on a farm, and that subplot widens the film’s audience logic. Blaze is voiced by Mykal-Michelle Harris, which gives the movie a second child character whose play habits stand apart from Bonnie’s screen-driven world.
Upgraded Buzzes
A rogue platoon of upgraded Buzzes is needed to sort out a hugely convoluted plot complication, and that is where the movie starts working against its own premise. The review says a new modest-hero gang grows out of obsolete battery-powered proto-tech devices with LCD displays, including Smarty Pants, the toilet trainer voiced by Conan O’Brien. That turns the film into a layered argument about old hardware, new hardware and the strange middle ground where toys try to survive by becoming technology themselves.
The same logic undercuts the film’s anti-tech stance. Lilypad is supposed to threaten the toys’ existence, yet the review says the device is also given a sentimental heroic turn, so the story asks viewers to fear the tablet and then accept its self-sacrificing goodness.
When She Loved Me in Toy Story
The review also recalls Jessie singing When She Loved Me, the Randy Newman song from Toy Story 2, and says Toy Story 5 revives that beat in a very spurious and unsatisfying way. That comparison is the sharpest clue to what the film is trying to do: borrow the franchise’s most painful emotion while reworking it for a story about screens, bullying and the pressure tech puts on children’s play.
For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple. Toy Story 5 is built around a clear parent-facing worry — what happens when a child’s attention shifts from toys to a tablet — but the review’s verdict is that the movie weakens its own message by making Lilypad both the threat and, eventually, the fix.
