Toy Story 5 Sneakily Addressed A Decades-Long Plot Hole

Though it seems to have divided critics, Toy Story 5 has proven an undeniable box office success. It’s achieved the franchise’s biggest ever opening weekend, raking in over £227 million in the two-day stretch.

We loved the new installment – entertainment editor Daniel Welsh described it as “a return to form for the beloved animated series [and] for Pixar in general, after a hit-and-miss run for the once-untouchable studio”.

And as ScreenRant pointed out, the movie should satisfy long-standing viewers on another front too: it addressed a decades-long plot hole.

Buzz Lightyear doesn’t know he’s a toy for much of the first 1995 Toy Story movie. He truly believes he’s a Space Ranger and tries to contact his Space Command.

But that leaves a problem fans have previously pointed out on sites like Reddit: if Buzz doesn’t think he’s a toy, why does he freeze when Andy (the human owner of the toys) enters a room he’s also in?

All the other toys stop moving and talking whenever a person can see them, presumably so they can keep up their secret activity unnoticed.

But, some fans have argued, if Buzz saw himself as another human, it didn’t make sense for him to maintain the illusion of inanimacy.

Toy Story 5 seems to have given us an answer.

The new movie begins with a batch of Buzz Lightyear toys, all of which (though they’d probably prefer “of whom”) think they’re real Rangers.

Like Andy’s Buzz Lightyear, they try to contact their Space Command and can’t get through. Instead, they end up in a shipping crate in a shipyard.

When a worker gets close to them, all of the toys freeze.

And once they come back to life, one of them asks: “Why did we freeeze?”

Nobody has an answer, though one Buzz muses: “fascinating”.

It doesn’t fully explain the plot hole. But it does address it, and it shows that freezing isn’t a conscious choice for the toys – meaning Buzz probably froxe because he didn’t have any other option.