To Infinity and Beyond

I’ll be perfectly honest with you right now. The hardest I’ve ever cried in a movie theater was at the end of “Toy Story 3.” Rewatching it to prepare for the release of “Toy Story 5,” I figured it wouldn’t wreck me as badly as it did 16 years ago. I thought I was an older, more mature man who could handle watching our favorite toys wordlessly hold hands as they await a fiery, garbage-incinerator fate.

Instead, I cried even harder.

I genuinely feel sorry for cynics who flippantly say, “I don’t watch cartoons; they’re for kids.” Yeah, some certainly are. But the best ones are aimed squarely at people who used to be kids (which, shocker, is all of us), written by honest-to-god adults, who—gasp—also remember what it was like to be small. These films are beautifully transcendent vessels for us to reconcile with the slow, incredibly fast loss of our own youth.

On the surface, the “Toy Story” franchise plays perfectly well for children. The adventures of Tom Hanks’ Sheriff Woody, Tim Allen’s spaceman Buzz Lightyear, Joan Cusack’s cowgirl Jessie and a sarcastic Mr. Potato Head, a heroic Slinky Dog, a cowardly T. rex and many more could easily just be thoughtless, cynical product placement for kids to stare at while parents think about what they’re fixing for dinner.

Instead, what Pixar and its team of magicians have crafted is a living history of modern childhood that acts as a profound marker for who we were as a species at the volatile crossover of the 20th and 21st centuries. Pixar remains the undisputed master at unearthing the sadness at the core of the human condition, and if you think that the writers and artists would have lost some of their thematic heft across five movies and 30 years, no one would blame you.

The original 1995 “Toy Story” gave us our first look at Woody as he feared being replaced by a flashier toy in Buzz Lightyear. It gave words to our anxieties about watching the world outgrow us. “Toy Story 2” showed us what toys would really fear: failing their purpose of being played with by children, which subtly mirrored our very human fears of just existing without truly living. “Toy Story 3” was unapologetically a meditation on death and pushed parents into having some very real conversations with their kids.

While “Toy Story 3” was a perfect send-off for Woody and co., with “Toy Story 4,” they smartly pivoted to having Andy, the child who played with them all these years, head off to college and pass his toys off to a little girl named Bonnie. Even as many franchise fans complained that “TS4” didn’t hold a candle to the rest of the series, the cartoon about anthropomorphic toys still managed to tell a quietly bleak fable about mental illness, a bittersweet love story and an elegiac rumination on a group of aging toys trying not to focus on the diminishing prospects of their collective futures. But, you know, for kids.

What enjoyment you take from “Toy Story 5” is largely predicated on what exactly you want from this series. “TS4” effectively finished Woody’s arc, much like the third film wrapped up Buzz’s story. So, consequently, most of our beloved legacy toys are sidelined this time around. Instead, we’re given a story where Jessie (still wonderfully voiced by Joan Cusack) takes center stage. With Andy long gone and most of the toys now lovingly possessed by eight-year-old Bonnie, the series shifts into an intimate look at what it’s like to be a little girl growing up today.

When Bonnie gets a frog-themed tablet known as a Lilypad (voiced by the always-welcome Greta Lee), she stops playing with Jessie and the other toys and immediately surrenders to the addictive glow of the screen. To the feeling of finding your friends while still suffering from crippling loneliness. The movie could’ve easily devolved into an angry anti-tech screed about inherent isolation kids feel in the digital age, especially post-pandemic. But, realistically, mega-corporation Disney would never alienate its tech-titan compatriots by pushing back against children receiving tablets before books. Instead, “Toy Story 5” pivots into a touching, grounded story about the sheer difficulty of making friends as a kid in 2026.

Does it have the same inherent power as the masterpieces that have come before? Not quite. As much as I love Jessie, changing the protagonist five films deep makes the cracks in the franchise visible for the first time. Don’t get me wrong—“Toy Story 5” is vastly superior to most of the animated films released over the last few years, but it also reveals a cynical truth: this is how the machine keeps running forever. Long after Tom Hanks and Tim Allen retire from these roles,, it’s clear how easily Pixar can just transfer these powerful life lessons onto different characters…to infinity and beyond.

I can’t decide if that’s deeply depressing or somewhat comforting. Just as the toys watch the world pass them by, I felt the same passage of time while sitting in the theater. Instead of a classic Randy Newman tune over the credits, it’s a Taylor Swift song. It’s not bad, necessarily, but it served as one more stark reminder of the quiet evolution of these movies into something I one day might not recognize.

I hope to keep watching these movies as long as they continue to communicate something meaningful and as long as I can remember the kid inside me who loved playing with toys on his bedroom floor. While “Toy Story 5” might not reach the profoundly high highs of the original trilogy, it still hums with that ephemeral magic only Pixar can conjure. As we quietly age alongside Woody, there’s something remarkable about how an animated series for kids has managed to say more about mortality, obsolescence and the human condition than almost any other cinema in our lifetime.

Not bad for a bunch of cartoons.

Toy Story 5
Dir. Andrew Stanton
Grade: B+
Now Playing at Regal Old Mill, McMenamins Old St. Francis, Sisters Movie House, Redmond Cinema, Madras Cinema 5 

Watch trailer

This article appears in the Source July 2, 2026.