Genre: Family/Animation
Premise: When Bonnie has trouble making friends because kids today only have online friends, her favorite toy, Jessie, attempts to locate the last real-world friend on earth for her.
About: Moviegoing is dead? Pft. Toy Story 5 just had the biggest opening of the entire franchise, taking in 160 million dollars.
Writers: Andrew Stanton & McKenna Harris
Details: 100 minutes
A lot of people are making a fuss over whether there needed to be another Toy Story movie. OF COURSE THERE NEEDED TO BE ANOTHER TOY STORY MOVIE! IT’S THE CROWN JEWEL OF PIXAR!
People. It’s Hollywood. No matter how much we bitch, they’re going to keep making movies in every franchise until people stop showing up to see them. What does it look like when a franchise ends? It looks like The Mandalorian and Grogu.
But Toy Story?? Toy Story does not have Star Wars problems. Toy Story has money printing problems. What are they going to do when the ink at the money printing warehouse dries up? That’s Toy Story’s problem.
The question behind the question here is the only one worth exploring. Because it’s a question you should all be asking yourselves every time you sit down to write a screenplay: “Do you actually have something to say with your movie?”
That’s why I think Toy Story 5 is a relevant entry in the franchise. Because it’s clearly trying to say something. That our children are becoming increasingly dependent on their electronic surroundings and not socializing and building in-life relationships.
Now, an argument can be made that Toy Story was a little late to the party with this take. But give them a break! It takes a long freaking time to make these films!
The plot takes a minute to untangle due to the fact that Toy Story 4’s ending split the toys up. Woody is off with most of the new toys somewhere far away. So the story begins with Jessie and a lot of the original crew losing their shit when they see that Bonnie, their kid, just got a new “lily pad” (an iPad made up to look like a frog).
Her parents got the Lily pad because Bonnie is struggling to make friends and, in the online world, all you have to do to make friends is “add a friend.” And that’s exactly what happens. Lily adds three new friends from Bonnie’s dance class. This is one of the better comedy bits in the screenplay. Lilly adds the friends within seconds. “Problem solved. Three friends added,” she tells Jessie. A confused Jessie starts darting her head around. “Where? Where are they?? There’s nobody here!!”
This friend-adding seems like a good thing at first but then her new online friends start making fun of the fact that she still plays with toys and now all Bonnie wants to do is play on her lily pad. All of a sudden, the toys are feeling the pressure.
Through a confluence of events, Jessie ends up at the old farm house of her original kid where she finds out that there’s an off-the-grid girl living there, Susie, who still plays with toys. This, Jessie decides, is the girl that Bonnie should be friends with. Unfortunately, the only way to connect with Bonnie nowadays is through devices, so she has to recruit several cast-off tech devices (including a tech potty trainer) to get Bonnie over to Susie’s.
The plan is to alert Bonnie’s mom that her daughter’s toys somehow ended up at this old farmhouse so the two will come to get them. Once Bonnie arrives, Jessie’s Operation Join Friends Together initiates. But when Bonnie’s new online friends start bullying her for her continued commitment to real toys, Bonnie decides she doesn’t want the toys anymore, placing the toys in the tragic predicament that this may be the end of the line for them.
There was something huge that stuck out right away about this script. Which is that this is a girl boss story. It’s all about Jessie and Bonnie’s adventure. Woody is barely in it. The other big male character, Buzz, is relegated to comedy sidekick status.
Do you know how dangerous it is to do that in 2026? The way that online campaigns can turn against a choice like this can smother a movie before it can take its first breath. Heck, that very thing happened TO THIS FRANCHISE in 2022, with “Lightyear.”
So, why isn’t anybody talking about this?
I’ll tell you why.
Because it’s clear with Toy Story 5 that they prioritized the story first. How do I know this? There are a lot of tells. But one of the easiest ways to decipher how extensively someone worked on a screenplay is how many setups and payoffs there are. And there are a ton in Toy Story 5. It’s very difficult to write a lot of setups and payoffs in a quickly cobbled together screenplay.
The problem with the diversity craze that took over Hollywood for nearly a decade is that they prioritized the diversity over everything. Every trailer, every article, every press tour was built around, “Look at how diverse this movie is!” And you saw the result of that in the movies themselves. They were never good. And why would they be? They prioritized something else before the actual story.
As I’ve always said, it is soooooooo so so so so so so so so so hard to write a good screenplay. Anything you do handicap that process is only going to put you further behind the 8 ball. Why make an impossible goal even harder? I never understood that.
I’m sure the Toy Story family pitched all sorts of movie ideas for Toy Story 5 with Woody being the priority in a lot of them. But this idea won out because it was the best idea. And that’s the way we should all be conceiving of our screenplays. What idea results in the best story? Whatever the answer is to that question, go with that movie!
Moving on, one of the things that’s always amazed me about this franchise is how many freaking characters it has. As a screenwriter, one of the toughest challenges you’ll have is managing your character count. Every single character you bring into the story is taking time away from bigger more important characters. Which is why, if you are going to bring in other characters, you better have a great reason for doing so. You should literally believe that your movie cannot work without those characters. Cause if it can, then you don’t need them.
There are more characters in the Toy Story franchise than probably any other franchise you can think of. Even Avengers. How many are we talking? I estimate between 50-60.
The lesson here, and it’s one Michael Arndt famously learned from the Toy Story team when he was laboring over Toy Story 2, is that when you have this many characters, you want to start dividing them into groups and treat the groups as one character.
So, with Jessie, her friends are dinosaur, Forky, Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, and several others. If you try to individualize all those characters, you’re going to explode your page count. You have to pick and choose which characters you actually want to develop a storyline for and then, for everyone else, they will move with the group as one. They can make a funny one-liner every once in a while. But otherwise, they are limited only to whatever goal their group has.
The last thing I’ll say about the Toy Story franchise – and really, this applies to all Pixar films – is that they’re the kings at making you cry. So how do they do it?? Well, there’s no exact formula, but I can tell you how they did it in this movie.
It is embedded in human nature for us to feel bad for people who really want to be a part of something but aren’t able to be, particularly if they’re being excluded by others.
One of the first things the writers establish here is that Bonnie really wants friends. But the neighbor kids she wants to be friends with think she’s too weird. Now, for the rest of the movie, we’re rooting for Bonnie to make friends. And every time she gets let down again, our heart breaks a little more for her. That constant breaking is what brings us to our emotional floor. And that way, when she finally gets her friend in the end, our heart goes from that bottom floor all the way to the top. That very quick rush of emotion is what triggers the waterworks.
If, however, Bonnie only kinda wanted to make friends. If she had some people in her life who already kinda liked her. Then our heart isn’t on the bottom floor. It’s somewhere on the middle floors. Which means, when she finally gets her friend in the end, our hearts aren’t that broken and they aren’t rising very far, which means the emotional build isn’t extensive enough to make us cry.
Anyway, I found Toy Story 5 to be pretty good. Would I recommend you go out and see it now? If you have younger kids, definitely. I think this movie would be quite eye opening to them. If you don’t have kids, wait until it comes out on Disney Plus. It’s a solid entry into the franchise.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A lot of people think that the Toy Story franchise is so popular because they’re toys and it’s cute to see toys play. But there’s actually a secret ingredient to its success. The main characters – the toys – are the most selfless characters in all of film. All they care about is making somebody else happy (their kids). Caring about others above yourself is one of the single most likable traits you can give a character. Give it to one of yours and see what happens.
