Toy Story 5

Watch for

• Jessie taking the franchise’s central role, with her history of abandonment giving the screen-time conflict a more personal emotional charge.
• Lilypad’s treatment as an ideological rival rather than a conventional villain: she genuinely wants to help Bonnie, but defines help very differently from the toys.
• Woody and Buzz reuniting after Toy Story 4, with Woody returning as an experienced outsider rather than automatically resuming command of Bonnie’s room.
• Bonnie’s imagination sequences and the Jessie/Bullseye/Daffodil material, which let Pixar contrast handmade childhood play with some of the studio’s most technically elaborate animation.

Production notes

Toy Story 5 was directed by Andrew Stanton, co-directed by Kenna Harris, produced by Lindsey Collins, and written by Stanton and Harris from a story by Stanton. Stanton had helped shape the series from the beginning, co-writing the earlier films before returning here as feature director. The filmmakers built the story around the idea that the toys do not age even as childhood culture changes around them; an early, more binary toys-versus-tech premise evolved into a clash between two forms of care for Bonnie. Greta Lee voices Lilypad, while Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, and Joan Cusack return as Woody, Buzz, and Jessie, with Jessie emerging as the film’s dramatic lead. Pixar also used three decades of technical progress without trying to make the world feel visually disconnected from the earlier movies. The studio said its render farm was roughly 12,000 times more powerful than during the first Toy Story, enabling complex work such as Jessie and Bullseye riding the realistic horse Daffodil. Bonnie’s imagination was visualized with a handmade pastel-and-craft aesthetic. Randy Newman returned to score his fifth Toy Story feature, and Taylor Swift contributed the Jessie-inspired original song “I Knew It, I Knew You.”

Trivia

• Jessie became the film’s lead organically during story development rather than through an initial plan to make her the protagonist; her earlier experience of being outgrown gave the filmmakers the emotional key to the story.
• Pixar estimated that its render farm was at least 12,000 times more powerful than it had been during production of the original Toy Story in 1995.
• The sequence involving Jessie and Bullseye riding the real horse Daffodil was described by the film’s visual-effects team as containing some of the most complicated character motion in the movie.
• Randy Newman returned for his fifth Toy Story feature score, continuing a musical relationship with the series that began with the original film more than three decades earlier.
• Taylor Swift wrote and performed the original song “I Knew It, I Knew You” after seeing an early version of the film; the song was inspired specifically by Jessie’s story.

Legacy

Toy Story 5 answered the question hanging over another return to Pixar’s oldest franchise: whether there was still a meaningful story to tell after Toy Story 4. Critics were broadly positive, with the film reaching 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 73 Metascore, and much of the praise focused on its ability to make the familiar characters feel relevant to a generation growing up with tablets and constant screens. Commercially, the result was emphatic. By the end of August 2026 the film had earned more than $1.1 billion worldwide, including roughly $479 million in North America, placing it among the year’s biggest global releases. Its more lasting contribution may be the decision to move Jessie to the center and to avoid reducing Lilypad to a simple anti-technology villain. Instead, the film frames toys and screens as competing philosophies of childhood—one built around open-ended imagination and companionship, the other around guidance, optimization, and instant engagement. More than thirty years after Toy Story, the fifth film shows why the premise can continue to evolve: the toys stay recognizably themselves while the world children grow up in keeps changing.