Toy Story 5 Is A Full-Blown Existential Crisis For Original Fans

By Robert Scucci
| Published 2 minutes ago

My wife and I finally gave in and took the kids to see Toy Story 5 at the drive-in, and now I’m depressed. It’s fine, and my kids had fun revisiting the characters, but I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t feel completely empty and devoid of hope for humanity after watching it. Namely because I work as hard as I can throughout the week to enjoy a day that’s not wall-to-wall screen time, only for the film to remind me that there’s really no escape, thanks to the source of the film’s conflict, a frog-shaped tablet known as Lily (Greta Lee).

On one hand, I understand. The central crew of toys in the Toy Story franchise were already dated in the ’90s. They were all hand-me-downs from decades past, but they still had their charm. It’s only natural for the franchise to keep up with the times by introducing new technology in the form of tablets, but really it just made me ask, “Why make this movie at all?”

I’m not sure what the lesson learned in Toy Story 5 is, but my main takeaway as a 38-year-old millennial with kids is, “My knees and back hurt, this full-sugar soda is going to give me a headache tomorrow, and now I’m afraid to give my kids screen time when I’ll probably need it the most.

Conform Or Be Cast Out 

Toy Story 5 centers on Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), who is gifted a Lilypad tablet by her parents, who hope she’ll fit in with other technologically inclined girls her age. Naturally, this incenses Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack), and the rest of the gang because Bonnie is no longer spending time with them or using her imagination. Of course, Woody (Tom Hanks) is called into action, and the toys butt heads with the new device before realizing they’re all part of Bonnie’s life and need to work together to help make her a whole person, developmentally speaking.

Kids need to express themselves through imaginative play. And given how AI-driven the world has become in just a few short years, mastering technology and integrating it across multiple touchpoints is essentially a necessary life skill at this point.

Right away, I questioned my own parenting because my kids sometimes favor their tech over their actual toys. But I’m a working-class dad who needs to fold laundry and cook dinner, and sometimes you just need to get the little rascals out of your hair so a five-minute task like emptying the dishwasher remains a five-minute task.

We’re told a story about a little girl desperately trying to fit in with kids her age, who gets ripped to shreds and cyberbullied as the toys and Lily try to set aside their differences, course-correct, and make things right.

Your Parents Are Supposed To Be On Your Side

What’s unnerving about Toy Story 5 isn’t Bonnie, her relationship with her toys, or even her feelings of rejection when she learns that simply having a tablet won’t be a viable way to form any meaningful friendships. It’s how much her parents absolutely suck here. They buy her a tablet, give her an entire day to get familiar with it, and then tell her they’ll be limiting her screen time throughout the week moving forward. They don’t. 

Immediately, Bonnie locks in and glazes over. It’s a look that’s all too familiar when you forget that you tossed your kid the Nintendo Switch an hour ago, and now they’re basically nonverbal. It happens to the best of us, and I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of. It’s my generation’s version of getting plunked down in front of the TV while your parents lose track of time schmoozing with the neighbors.

In Toy Story 5, however, this behavior continues pretty much unchecked. Bonnie very quickly forms an unhealthy relationship with Lily, and it almost immediately leads to cyberbullying. While Bonnie walks around the house on the verge of tears, her parents barely intervene to find out what’s going on with her. I fully understand that young adult fiction tends to rely heavily on incompetent adults, but their lack of attention toward their own child in Toy Story 5 was so hard to get through.

As a parent, I get that it’s easy to tune your kids out sometimes, especially when you’re trying to get work done or finish a project around the house. Your kids will scream, cry, plead, and 99 percent of the time you know they’re making a mountain out of a molehill. You get on their level, break up whatever scuffle they’re having, and they’re usually pretty good at self-regulating if you do those things consistently.

Bonnie, though, isn’t bickering, crying, or screaming. She’s walking around with the kind of heaviness that would make any reasonable parent sit down with her, ask what’s wrong, and refuse to budge until they got some sort of reasonable answer, or at least enough information to work with. Their behavior here is borderline neglectful, and it made me really sad because a studio spending $250 million to get this point across tells me they knew people would resonate with it because they’ll probably identify with the parents. 

The adventure the toys and Lily have in Toy Story 5 is fine, and I know Bonnie’s story is supposed to pull at your heartstrings because everybody has trouble fitting in at some point in their life, and it does have a happy ending. And it makes sense that the parents would have a sparse presence in an adventure movie about toys, but the whole thing just makes me want to hug my kids and lock the TV up in the closet.