Cast your mind back to 1999, when Toy Story 2 conjured up Pixar’s most crushing moment in its history thus far. That film was about the toys facing their mortality of a sort, and it came to a head in the story of Jessie the Cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack), whose owner Emily grew up and left her behind. That scene was made all the more wrenching by maybe the saddest song Randy Newman ever wrote, “When She Loved Me.” Toy Story 5 brings Jessie back to that primal scene, which proves to be what makes this latest installment in the series one of its best.
The movie begins with Bonnie (voiced by Scarlett Spears) coming up on her 8th birthday and having trouble making friends, so her parents buy her a frog-shaped tablet named Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee) that allows Bonnie to play games with the other girls from her ballet class. Neglected, Buzz (voiced by Tim Allen) accidentally calls Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) out of retirement to bring back Bonnie’s attention, but it’s Jessie whose attempts to get rid of Lily end up transporting herself and her horse Bullseye back to the ranch that they shared with Emily.
The new characters that this series keeps introducing help prevent it from going stale. This one receives a caffeine shot from Smarty Pants (voiced by Conan O’Brien), an outdated device shaped like a roll of toilet paper that’s intended to potty-train toddlers. Why this device needs to be able to connect to wi-fi, I’m not sure, but Smarty helps Jessie communicate with the other toys at Bonnie’s house. More than that, he injects a ton of poop jokes into the story as well as mirroring Jessie’s story, since his kid, a girl named Blaze (voiced by Mykal-Michelle Harris) who collects horse figurines and keeps a pig as a house pet, has outgrown him, too. In a funny touch, all the tech devices act drunk when they’re low on battery power, and O’Brien brings a ton of energy to the role.
The plotline with Lily is intelligently handled: We know that the screen isn’t going anywhere, and the studio that made digital animation into a thing all those decades ago won’t get away with a story that says that analog toys are best. Our set of toys instead comes to a sort of truce with the device. The subplot with a flotilla of Buzz Lightyears (all voiced by Allen) doesn’t add much, even if the opening sequence with them shipwrecked on a desert island amounts to a cute parody of the Hanks-starring Cast Away. Adding more are the scenarios that Bonnie invents for her toys, which are noticeably girlier than the ones that Andy came up with in the first two films.
With all that, Toy Story 5’s success hangs on the filmmaker’s correct decision to turn this into Jessie’s story, relegating both Woody and Buzz to supporting roles. Taylor Swift contributes a song that’s meant to bookend “When She Loved Me,” and while her “I Knew It, I Knew You” is far from bad, even Taylor can’t match Randy Newman at the apex of his craft.
Never mind, though. It’s back at her old home that Jessie returns to the oak tree on the property where Emily used to spend time with her. There she makes a discovery that shows her the treasured memories she left with the girl who has long grown up and left the place. Like the rest of us, Jessie is only here for a short time, and what matters isn’t the way things end between her and her loved ones, but the way she affects the people around her while she’s here. That’s what a fair number of movies are about, but it’s good that kids will be introduced to it by a movie as good as this one.
Toy Story 5
Voices by Joan Cusack, Tim Allen, and Tom Hanks. Directed by Andrew Stanton. Written by Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris. Rated PG.
