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philthepill.online · @philthepill.online@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Toy Story 5 7/10

This review may contain spoilers.

A lot of the audience "loves" that the reveal that Jessie's first kid, Emily, named her own child Jessie. It puts a much nicer button on that abandonment plotline from Toy Story 2.

To me, it undercuts one of the actual truths from Jessie's story in TS2. In that story, Emily was a perfectly normal and well-adjusted human who had moved on from some specific attachments of her childhood. The point of the Jessie/Emily relationship is that this was something that meant everything to Jessie's existence, but was only a small part of Emily's.

Toy Story 5 is now retconning things to make it canon that Jessie wasn't just a treasured toy of Emily's childhood. She's now a significant nostalgic memory, influencing her decisions throughout motherhood. The moment of leaving her on the side of the road is now a regret. At minimum a bittersweet divergence point that elevates Jessie's role in her life.

But....that's not the point of being a toy. Not every toy is Jessie, Woody, or Buzz. Most toys aren't that. Most toys are...ephemeral. For every Woody, there are multiple Rocky Gibraltars or Lenny Binoculars. The whole point in the toys' emotional journey of the first three movies is to come to terms with this and find acceptance.

But as the franchise goes on and becomes more...toyetic, to bastardize a concept, it starts to seep this idea that every. Single. Piece. Of plastic manufactured for the merchandising revenue of a corporation is special. And as millennials reconcile with the fact that our childhoods were marketed at the peak of a certain kind of consumerism and our adulthoods are marred by the consequences of the nineties, we *must* elevate our childhoods to be this significant.

Toy Story 5 now assumes that the toys - having grown in their cultural cache being fed on the marketing budget of the Walt Disney Corporation - are important *forever.* That your childhood in its totality is relevant and to be revered. That's how Disney works, now more than ever. You go to Disney World as a child and you return as an adult, maybe with children, maybe without.

The Emily flashback "traumatized" a lot of fans of the franchise. In the moment, it feels like a reprimand to the audience for having ever moved on past an old plaything. But if you follow the full arc of Toy Story 2, the point is that there's life after that first love. It's your attachment to your old life that interferes with your ability to process the new.

Both TS4 and TS5 take the lessons from the first trilogy and say, "But wait. It's more complicated than that." And there's something to be said for checking in with yourself and valuing the things that perhaps you were pressured to leave behind. But I think that story would have best been told with a different character. A new character.

To go back and retcon Jessie's story cheapens the finality of that original backstory and it just feels....plastic.

Anyway, I like this better than TS4 and I think Joan Cusack and - begrudgingly - Tim Allen did well here. I enjoyed the army of Buzz Lightyears.

#movie

Published 2026-10-05 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere