Toy Story 5 is the best sequel yet. It's still barely about kids

Toy Story 5 is good. It's very good, actually — a surprisingly strong entry in a series that two movies ago struggled to justify returning to its plush, plastic and porcelain characters, whose stories felt over and done with.

Even more, it's topical. That's a fact you could probably glean from the aggressively trendy poster, showing Andy's original set of playthings — now under new, younger ownership — cowering behind a sneering, LeapFrog-esque tablet. Though given its attention to the incursion of tech and unmitigated screentime into the sacred realm of childhood — and the ensuing iPad Kid scourge they created — Toy Story 5 doesn't play out in as dour a fashion as you might expect.

But it is all undercut by the fact that like virtually every other children’s film nowadays, Toy Story 5 is hardly about children at all.

But why does that matter? Especially as the surface story delivers on everything you could hope for, balancing its focus between Woody (Tom Hanks) replacement Jessie (Joan Cusack) obsessed with helping her kid, Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), and Bonnie's struggles connecting with precociously mature girls her age. Not to mention all the horrors of an internet-based childhood.

These horrors get even more clear after Bonnie’s parents try to fix those other problems by gifting her a "Lilypad" tablet of her own. The controlling, entirely unwelcome Lily (Greta Lee) and all the other beeping devices she represents quickly push aside the shocked and lonely toys eight-year-old Bonnie and her neighbours no longer have much time to play with.

As it goes, Bonnie’s pain over a seemingly inherent inability to connect with other kids is hard to watch. Elsewhere, a scene involving the casual but cutting way cyberbullying has become an unavoidable element of childhood is even more eye-opening, given the (unfortunately realistic) age of the kid it’s happening to.

In what might be a more controversial gold star, there’s the balanced way Toy Story 5 walks between the evils and ease of using tech to tame kids.

Granted, a lesson that anything with a screen is evil would likely make this feel more dated — especially in a franchise that only thought to talk about screens in 2026. What's not dated is also the most accidentally incisive element of the whole thing.

The central theme of every Toy Story going back to the 1995 outing that first put Pixar on the map is a group of toys looking at a child as the central reason for their existence, whose protection and worship is their sole purpose.

What’s wrong with that? Not all that much on the surface — especially since Toy Story 5 finally creates a real character from the central kid, instead of a near-featureless giant that bumbles in and out of the toys’ lives, with few identifying gestures beyond an affection for cowboys and a mercurial interest in the dolls that worship them.

The theme of a child shepherd of sentient toys could work as a jolt of self-confidence for relatively powerless children taught that they may be as important to their action figures as their parents are to them. But it doesn’t do much to investigate or know these kids. From Toy Story to Toy Story 3, our owner Andy is little more than a god-like figure, a physical manifestation of both fear and purpose for the anxious residents of his room.

Given that, every movie follows the same fears. Is Andy happy? Is Andy playing with me? Can I get back home to Andy? Can I trick Andy into playing with me after all these years? Now that Andy has outgrown me, can I find solace — and purpose — in the fact I helped him get where he’s going?

Beyond the existential terror this responsibility can inspire in a kid with a box of neglected toys, it’s not their story. In essence, it’s a story of and about parents and parenting: the desire to build a person for a future that, if they succeed, they’ll have to give that child away to. The only difference from reality here is that the loving parent stand-ins here — the toys forever pining after their little ones' attention — have no control over the kid’s actions.

But a continuing, overarching focus on what childhood should look like — and how to protect it — is getting increasingly tired. It is the "reproductive futurism" theory Lee Edelman came up with in his book No Future: the cultural practice of characterizing the child as a generic and unreal representation of the future, with parents and politicians making choices based on how they would serve that generic, unreal idea.

Scottish film professor Karen Lury argued in The Child in Cinema that any adult's attempt to recreate childhood just references a universalized and simple past that never existed. The result then will always be stories "by adults for adults, or — at best, or sometimes at worst — by adults ‘as if’ they were able to speak for children."

Toy Story exhibits this perhaps more than any other franchise — the series is literally about the worship of the idea and performance of childhood. But the series is now explicitly about maintaining a nostalgic version of it — at least, in part, as a reaction to the incursion of big bad tech.

This feeds into what nostalgia always feeds into: a yearning for an idealized before-time at the expense of honestly engaging with problems in the present. Toy Story 5 isn't the worst example of this. But because like every other Toy Story it rests on the moral of how childhood should be, it becomes less about those actual children.

Because even with its measured stance, the movie still becomes more about its headline-baiting topic — just by the nature of it being there. A topic that, viewed as an implicit attack on childhood, is already turning society on its head.

That isn’t to say Toy Story 5 is bad. Just something to think about.