The Premise
Two years after Toy Story 4, Bonnie is eight and getting a frog-shaped tablet called Lilypad from her parents, who want her to make friends. The tablet is charming, chatty, and immediately more interesting than a room full of plastic cowboys. Jessie (Joan Cusack) takes point while Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz (Tim Allen) hang back, and the toys have to figure out what they do when the kid stops looking at them. Conan O'Brien voices Lilypad. Greta Lee, Craig Robinson, and a small bench of newcomers fill out the toy shelf. Andrew Stanton directs, co-writing with Kenna Harris. It's Pixar doing what Pixar does at the technical level: the light on plastic still looks like nothing else in animation.
The Case For
Stanton knows these toys. The opening act, before the sermon kicks in, has the old rhythm: small physical gags, Jessie finally getting a movie built around her, Cusack playing panic and pep in the same line. Conan is genuinely funny as the tablet, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about a Pixar antagonist. There's a sequence in the first twenty minutes involving Bonnie's bedroom rug and a charging cable that's staged like a silent film, and it's the best pure animation Pixar's shipped since Coco. Randy Newman's score is doing quiet work in the background that you only notice if you're listening for it. The craft floor is high.
The Case Against
The script has one idea and it will not stop telling you the idea. Screens bad, imagination good, screens bad, imagination good. Every third scene pauses so a character can announce the thesis out loud, and the emotional beats get elbowed aside to make room. Woody and Buzz are basically cameos in their own franchise, which is a choice, but the movie doesn't earn the handoff. Several new toys exist purely to have a line and vanish. Ninety minutes of story stretched across a hundred and five.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
Parents dragging a six-year-old will get exactly what they paid for and the kid won't complain. If you loved Toy Story 3 for the gut-punch and Toy Story 4 for the weird existential detour, this one plays smaller and safer, closer to a very expensive PSA with jokes. Fans of Inside Out 2's messy interiority will find this one flat. If you're in it for Woody and Buzz specifically, adjust expectations down. It's a movie you can walk in and out of the room during and not lose the thread.
The Ruling
BACKGROUND TV because the craft is real and the writing is tired. Stanton can still stage a scene, Cusack finally gets her showcase, and the animation is gorgeous. But the script keeps stopping the story to underline what the story already showed you two scenes ago, and that's the Lecture Test failing in slow motion. It isn't the theme that's the problem, kids and screens is a fine thing to make a movie about. It's that the movie doesn't trust its own images to land the point, so it hands the point to the characters as dialogue and lets the plot idle while they read it aloud. Put it on while you fold laundry. Bonnie's fine. So are you.
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