There is something slightly unsettling about seeing a tablet with a frog face trick a child into ignoring her toys. Pinar has always been able to find the “soft spot,” where a simple moving frame can touch something real in your chest. But with Toy Story 5 and its main bad guy, Lilypad, they seem to have gone in a direction that is less fantastical and more painfully familiar.
When the trailer came out, parents all over the country knew right away what it was about. Not Woody’s new bald spot or his poncho that looks worn out. Not even Buzz and the rest of the old group coming back, which was great. “Tech’s invaded our house” was Jessie’s line that stopped everyone. She said it with the tired weight of someone who has already lost half the argument. It’s hard not to think about how many homes that sentence describes right now.
The voice of Lilypad is done by Greta Lee, and from what we saw in the trailer, she is cute, a little scary, and made to be irresistible to kids. The tablet doesn’t scream or make threats. She quietly wins because she’s more satisfying right away than a stuffed cowboy. That’s the kind of cruelty that Pixar shows here. Something bad isn’t beating the toys. They’re losing to something that is easy for them.
Somewhat shockingly, Woody’s answer to Jessie was meant to be so strong: “Toys are for play, but tech is for everything.” He says it as if he’s trying to talk himself out of a bad mood. That line sums up a whole parenting philosophy: slowly coming to terms with the fact that screens are here to stay and that maybe your resistance is just a way to put things off. It’s likely that most parents who saw that trailer knew what it was before they could say it.
In this movie, Bonnie is eight years old and can’t take her eyes off of her tablet for too long. For a lot of families, that detail is close enough to home life to feel like a true story. There is a real conflict. The donation box that the toys end up in isn’t a very creative idea. On a Saturday morning, you can go to any garage sale in your neighborhood and find bins full of perfectly good plastic cowboys, dinosaurs, and pull-string ponies.
The toys in Toy Story have always worked because they hurt when they get thrown away. Buzz Lightyear was the bad guy in the first movie. It was time in Toy Story 3. It’s something less clear-cut and harder to argue with here. You can talk to a kid about getting a new toy. It’s a lot harder to beat a device that does your homework, plays games, streams cartoons, and talks back to you.
The fact that Tony Hale plays Forky and Conan O’Brien voices Smarty Pants, a tech toy for training kids to use the bathroom, suggests that Pixar isn’t just seeing this as a tragedy. There’s going to be humor soon. But the emotional core seems serious, and it’s the right subject for the fifth movie in a series that has always been about love and things that are no longer useful.
There will be a fifth Toy Story movie on June 19, 2026. It’s still not clear if Pixar will give us any simple answers. But based on the history of the franchise, there’s a good chance that the ending will make you cry a little and then feel something that you can’t quite shake when you look over at the screens in your home.
