Nineteen-ninety-five was the dawn of the internet for most people, and the same year saw the release of the first Toy Story movie. Yet cyberspace and “tech” has rarely intruded into the frantic playroom of the Toy Story characters. Toy Story 3 (2010) was at one stage due to have them searching for one of their kin on the web until that script was ditched. (It was a brief time when the franchise was taken away from Pixar, the legendary outfit that pioneered cartoons done by computer chip.)
Today, though, our zombieland of bleary eyes and stressed scrolling on small screens can no longer be ignored. The valiant, hyper-neurotic toys brought to life (animation’s best-ever joke about animation) face an ultimate foe: the algorithm. Jessie the cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack), Buzz Lightyear the space ranger (Tim Allen) and the others in the toybox are sent into a Force 12 flap when their owner – the timorous, eight-year-old Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) – is given a computer tablet to help her bond with other kids, all now hooked on pixels 24/7.
This is Armageddon for our plastic heroes. “The age of toys is over,” they shriek. Bonnie’s new tablet is a frog-themed social media device called Lilypad (Greta Lee), a complacent green monster with wily eyes and the promise she can help Bonnie reach “all her developmental goals”. Jessie and company are shunted aside, and their salvation will come after a chaotic odyssey during which Jessie hooks up with some ancient Web 1.0 devices in a distant household (the funniest of which is an electronic potty-trainer voiced by Conan O’Brien). An army of new-wave Buzz Lightyears, toppled from a beached ship, join the fray.
Where the earlier Toy Story movies combined animation’s frenzied acrobatics with sturdy, focused storylines and witty themes for all ages, for the first time plot turns, backstory reveals and gags feel dysrhythmic, contrived and throwaway (in the hands of franchise veteran Andrew Stanton and co-director McKenna Harris). Just the first 15 minutes of the original Toy Story was a blitz of brilliant Simpsons-style gags, verbal and visual, but here the jokes drop rarely and heavy. At the close, resolving the threat from tech crosses the threshold into the treacly.
Cusack’s Jessie is now the lead, while Tom Hanks’s Woody-the-cowboy turns up from elsewhere to do little but spar once more with Buzz. He now has a bald spot and a paunch, which makes no sense, and it’s the worst role Hanks has had in anything for a while.
The near-constant, yammering neuroses of the Toy Story characters has always outdone even those in adult comedies, from Mel Brooks to Curb Your Enthusiasm. But where the latter might just be anxiety for the sake of it, here the worry is the flip side of intense separation anxiety, as the toys fret that their child owners are growing out of them. Yet it’s always been expressed in a very adult kind of purgatorial panic mode.
What might that reflect among the Toy Story artistic personnel? Cabin fever of young guys trapped in a writers’ room? Animators who’ve spent too long staring at sketches pinned up on the wall? The eternal, Winnie-the-Pooh ache of moving on from childhood? Or just the shock of love that’s only ever temporary (here we’re maybe back with the guys in the writers’ room).
Toy Story 5 at least deserves credit for tackling a serious, timely topic. It continues to root for childhood bounded by A. A. Milne-like innocence, in as much as a cautionary tale about computers can be credible in the hands of a company built entirely around silicon. Yet this can only go so far when the franchise is also the tip of a merchandising spear for Pixar’s corporate daddy, Disney. I was surprised to find that Toy Story action figures even extend to Forky, a character from Toy Story 4 made crudely out of a disposable plastic “spork” that was a kind of anti-toy joke (£30 on Amazon). And, naturally, Disney already flogs your kids their very own Lilypads. Suitable for ages 3 and older.
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