Toy Story 4 (2019) Review: Beautiful, But Did We Need This?

🤠 This review is part of the The Toy Story Series – watch all four films ranked and reviewed for dads.

Let us start with what is true: Toy Story 4 (2019) is the most technically accomplished animated film Pixar has ever made. The antique shop environment — with its layered reflections, dust motes hanging in shafts of light, the depth of a hundred years of accumulated objects — represents a level of rendering achievement that bears stopping and appreciating as pure craft. The rain sequences outside the antique shop have mood and texture that belong in a cinematography conversation alongside live-action films. The animation team delivered something genuinely extraordinary.

The story, unfortunately, did not require an extraordinary film to tell it. It required a reason to exist, and that is the thing Toy Story 4 never quite finds.

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Part 3 ended in 2010 with “So long, partner” — one of cinema’s great final moments, from any genre. Woody, having passed Andy’s toys to Bonnie, watches Andy drive away. The story was done. The emotional arc was complete. Everything the series had been building toward — the question of what it means to be loved for a finite time, the grace of letting go — found its resolution in that driveway in the Texas afternoon.

Part 4 arrives nine years later to explore what happened after the perfect ending. The result is Pixar’s most beautiful film in service of the franchise’s least necessary story.

For the record: a 6/10 from Dadnology is not “bad.” It means the film is worth watching, delivers real pleasures, and does not embarrass itself. It means the craft is genuinely good and Forky is genuinely funny. It also means the film does not earn its place in the series and leaves Woody in a state that feels like a wrong answer to a question the audience never asked.

Forky: The Best New Character in a Film Full of Wrong Decisions

Forky is a spork. A craft spork, to be specific — googly eyes, pipe-cleaner arms, and a popsicle stick base, constructed by Bonnie on her first day of kindergarten because she needed something to hold and there were no toys in the classroom. The act of creation brought Forky to life as a toy. Forky is devastated by this development.

Forky believes he is rubbish. He was made from rubbish. He belongs in rubbish. Every moment he is not in a bin is an existential affront to his self-understanding. He spends the first act of the film attempting to throw himself into every available receptacle while Woody physically prevents him from succeeding.

Tony Hale’s voice performance is the funniest thing in any Toy Story film since Tim Allen established Buzz’s delusional sincerity in Part 1. Forky’s identity crisis is played absolutely straight — he is not performing confusion, he is genuinely suffering the specific torment of a being who knows what he is made of and cannot reconcile that with what he has become. In a different film, built on a different premise, Forky would be the breakout character of a great sequel.

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In this film, Forky’s story is interrupted by the antique shop plot and the Bo Peep reunion and the Gabby Gabby arc, and the film never quite decides which of these it is actually about. The result is a film that feels like four short films edited into feature length — individually interesting, collectively unfocused.

Gabby Gabby and the Antique Shop: The Best Villain in the Wrong Film

Gabby Gabby is a 1950s pull-string doll who has been in the antique shop since she was manufactured with a broken voice box. She has never been purchased. She has never been loved by a child. She wants Woody’s voice box because her own is defective, and she wants it with a patience and resource that make her genuinely threatening.

Christina Hendricks voices Gabby Gabby with a sweetness that curdles into something more unsettling than anything the character does overtly. The character’s henchmen — Benson and three identical ventriloquist dummies with porcelain faces and the specific wrongness that ventriloquist dummies have always carried — are the scariest things the franchise has produced since Sid’s mutant toys. The antique shop sequences have an atmosphere that belongs to a slightly different genre than the film around them.

The 7+ guidance for Part 4 is primarily about Gabby Gabby’s dummies. They are not violent. They are simply unsettling in the precise way that porcelain faces with moving mouths tend to be, and the film uses them well enough that younger children will remember them at bedtime.

The resolution of Gabby Gabby’s arc is the best sequence in the film — a moment of genuine emotional generosity that takes the character somewhere unexpected. It is the scene that comes closest to what the Toy Story films do best. It is also not enough to carry a feature.

Bo Peep: A Potentially Great Arc, Underused

Bo Peep’s return after her absence from Parts 2 and 3 is set up as a significant emotional development: Woody’s former love interest, now a capable and independent figure who has found her purpose outside the toy-child relationship. The concept is good. The execution is underdeveloped.

Bo’s story — toys who have found freedom and purpose without owners — is the most interesting idea in Part 4 and the one least fully explored. The film gestures toward a genuine philosophical debate: is a toy’s purpose only fulfilled through being loved by a child, or can a toy find meaning in independence and adventure? The original trilogy answered that question with certainty. Part 4 wobbles on it, then uses it to justify a conclusion that the film has not fully earned.

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Toy Story 4 (Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)

The standard physical release. Still a handsome-looking film on Blu-ray, and the bonus features are more interesting than the film's reputation suggests.

Woody’s Ending: The Wrong Answer

Here is the specific problem. The Toy Story series has always been about what it means to be truly needed: by Andy, by Bonnie, by the specific child whose name is on your boot. The first three films built their emotional architecture on the premise that this love — impermanent, specific, real — is the thing worth having. Woody’s willingness to go to Bonnie rather than stay in storage was the entire point of Part 3.

Part 4’s conclusion sends Woody in a different direction. He chooses Bo Peep and independence over Bonnie. He chooses his own story over the toy-child relationship that defines what the previous films told us he was.

This is not a wrong decision in life — people do leave things behind when something truer calls them. But it is the wrong decision for Woody in the context of what this series established. The goodbye at the end of Part 3 was the correct farewell because it completed the arc the series had been building. Part 4’s ending starts a new arc that nobody was waiting for and the film does not have time to properly tell.

The result is a conclusion that feels like something was prioritized over character — whether that is franchise longevity, a nod toward adult female audience segments with Bo Peep, or simply a desire to do something different with Woody after three films. Whatever the reason, the ending lands wrong, and a wrong ending is a long shadow to cast backward over two hours of otherwise competent filmmaking.

From the screen to the shelf: Slinky and the gang carry on — they fit your shelf as the LEGO Toy Story Slinky Dog Bookends (43301) review.

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Slinky Dog bookends in brick — the gang on your shelf.

📺 Movie night sorted: thousands of films and shows are streaming on Prime Video — free for 30 days. Worth a look before you buy the disc.

Is Toy Story 4 worth watching?

Once, yes. The animation is Pixar’s finest technical achievement and Forky is genuinely funny. The antique shop environment alone is worth the runtime for anyone who appreciates animation craft. As a sequel to Part 3’s perfect ending it is unnecessary, and Woody’s conclusion feels tonally wrong. Worth a single watch for completeness, not a purchase for the permanent shelf.

Is Toy Story 4 scary for children?

We recommend 7 and up. Gabby Gabby’s ventriloquist dummy henchmen are genuinely unsettling — porcelain faces, moving mouths, and the specific wrongness that ventriloquist dummies carry in any medium. The antique shop atmosphere is also more menacing than typical Pixar environments. The 7+ guidance reflects this rather than any explicit content.

What is Forky in Toy Story 4?

Forky is a spork that Bonnie made into a craft project on her first day of kindergarten, accidentally bringing him to life as a toy. He is convinced he is rubbish and spends most of the film trying to throw himself away. Tony Hale’s voice performance makes Forky the funniest character Pixar has produced in years. He is the best thing in the film by a significant margin.

Why does Toy Story 4's ending feel wrong?

Because Toy Story 3 closed Woody’s story with a perfect, emotionally earned goodbye, establishing that the love between a toy and a child is the thing worth having. Part 4 then has Woody choose independence over that relationship, undoing the emotional logic of three films. It is not a wrong decision in life. It is the wrong decision for this specific character after this specific series.