Toy Story 5 Review: The Tablet Arrives, and Pixar Finds Its Heart

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

I went into Toy Story 5 with my arms folded. Toy Story 4 never sat right with me: gorgeous, funny in places, and built around an ending that undid what Part 3 had finished so perfectly. A fifth film felt like a franchise refusing to leave the party. I was excited anyway, because it is Toy Story, and I counted down to it landing on Disney+.

Two hours later I was sitting there with the specific, slightly embarrassing warmth of being eight years old again. Toy Story 5 is not perfect. It takes its time to get going. But once it has you, it holds on, and it ends on the kind of feeling Pixar used to deliver as a matter of routine and has not managed in this series since 2010.

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The setup is the most relatable thing Pixar has done in years. Bonnie gets a tablet. The tablet is called Lilypad, she is shaped like a frog, and Bonnie stops playing with her toys. That is it. No collector, no daycare dictator, no antique shop. Just the quiet, everyday disappearance every parent with a kid and a screen has watched happen at their own kitchen table.

The Story: Jessie Takes the Badge

The biggest structural change is who leads. Woody is no longer Bonnie’s sheriff. Jessie is, and she is the right choice. She has always been the toy with the most to lose from being forgotten, and Toy Story 2 told her backstory so well that putting her in charge of the fight against a child drifting away feels earned rather than convenient. Joan Cusack carries the film, and Taylor Swift’s song “I Knew It, I Knew You” was written after Swift saw an early cut and was moved by Jessie’s arc. You can feel why.

Woody is still around. He has been off helping Bo Peep find homes for abandoned toys, and he comes back when Jessie calls him for advice. That is a smart fix for the problem Part 4 created: the film respects where Woody ended up instead of pretending it did not happen, and it does not let him steal the spotlight from the character whose turn it is.

Lilypad is the other clever choice. Greta Lee plays her as something more interesting than a villain. She has her own ideas about what is best for Bonnie, and the film is honest enough to let those ideas be partly right. Screens are not evil in this movie. They are just very, very good at being the easiest option, which is a much harder thing to argue with and a much more accurate picture of what we deal with at home.

The Slow First Half, and the Second Half That Pays It Off

Here is the honest bit. The first hour did not grab me straight away. The idea is good and the opening scenes are lovely to look at, but the film spends a while setting up its pieces: the new toys, the sleepover, the trip that drags Jessie away from Bonnie. It is busy rather than gripping, and there were a couple of moments where I wondered if this was going to be Toy Story 4 all over again, beautiful wallpaper on a story that did not need telling.

It is not. Somewhere around the midpoint the film finds what it is actually about, and from there it is wonderful. Without spoiling the route it takes, the second half is about what really matters in childhood: not the toy, not the screen, but who you play with and how much of yourself you put into it. Pixar makes that point the way the first three films made theirs, through a single child at play, with imagination rendered as something you can see. It is the most Toy Story thing Toy Story has done in sixteen years.

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The film also lands the screen-time theme without wagging a finger at kids. It is aimed squarely at parents, and it hit me harder than I expected. The point is not that tablets are bad. The point is that the hours go somewhere, and the film asks gently whether that is where you want them to go. The tablet-heavy parent in the room will feel it. I certainly did.

The Animation: The Best-Looking Film Pixar Has Made

I want to be careful with superlatives, so here is a measured one: Toy Story 5 is one of the best animated films I have ever seen, purely on how it looks. Every surface has weight. Fabric has weave, plastic has scuffs, the light in Bonnie’s room behaves like real afternoon light. The playtime sequences switch to a soft pastel style that shows the world the way Bonnie imagines it, and the contrast with the grounded look of the rest of the film is gorgeous.

There is real engineering behind it. This is the first Pixar feature rendered with RenderMan XPU, the studio’s hybrid GPU and CPU renderer, and it shows in the density of detail on screen. You do not need to know any of that to notice it. You just see it.

Watching It on Apple Vision Pro

I watched it in the Disney+ app on my Apple Vision Pro, and I would recommend that to any parent with a headset who gets a quiet evening to themselves first. On a virtual screen the size of a cinema wall, the texture work becomes the point. You see the stitching on Woody’s vest and the wear on Buzz’s wings in a way a TV across the room never shows you.

• The detail payoff: this is a film where a bigger screen genuinely changes what you see. On Vision Pro it looks like a premium cinema showing.
• The obvious irony: I watched a film about a screen swallowing a child’s attention on a computer strapped to my face. I noticed. I am choosing to call it research.
• Dad Alert: the headset is for your solo first watch. The second watch belongs on the living room TV with the kids, which is where this film is meant to land.

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Is Toy Story 5 OK for Young Kids?

Yes, and this is where it beats every film before it for families with little ones. The older Toy Story films all have at least one sequence that can send a small child behind the sofa: Sid’s mutant toys in Part 1, the incinerator in Part 3, Gabby Gabby’s dummies in Part 4. Toy Story 5 has nothing like that. It is rated PG for some thematic elements and rude humor, and the rude humor is mostly courtesy of Smarty Pants, a potty-training toy voiced by Conan O’Brien, and it is exactly the kind of joke the under-tens in the room will repeat for a week.

Our age guidance is still 6 and up, and not because anything in it is scary. A younger child will sit through it fine, but the slow first half asks for patience a four-year-old does not have, and the heart of the film is a theme you want your kid old enough to talk about. From about six, they follow why Bonnie drifts away from her toys, and that is when the film does its best work. Watching it with the kids is a different film from watching it alone, in the best way: they get the toys and the jokes, you get the parent half.

The Conversation It Starts: Tablets Are Not Everything

This is the part I did not expect from a Pixar sequel. Toy Story 5 is one of the best conversation starters about screens I have come across, precisely because it does not preach. Lilypad is not a monster. Bonnie is not a bad kid. The tablet is simply easier, and the film shows what slowly goes missing when the easy option wins every afternoon.

That gives you an opening that does not sound like a lecture. Ask what Bonnie stopped doing once she had the tablet. Ask which toy they would want to come looking for them. Ask what they would play if every screen in the house went off for a Saturday. Kids who just spent a film rooting for Jessie are far more willing to have that talk than kids who are being told to put the iPad down. It is a family film that hands you the follow-up for free.

It also works if your kids have never seen a Toy Story film. Jessie, Buzz and Woody are introduced well enough that the history is a bonus rather than homework. If they do want the backstory later, our Toy Story series guide runs the films in order with honest age notes for each.

After the credits, the toy aisle will come calling. Jessie is the star this time, and the Jessie and Bullseye 2-pack is the most faithful version of the pair from the film, while the talking Jessie figure is the one that answers back. For a Buzz fan, the flying RC Buzz Lightyear is the closest thing to flight a living room allows, and Mr. Smartypants is there for whoever laughed loudest. And if a film about screens makes you want to hand over a screen that creates something instead, the Toy Story 5 kids camera fits the brief; our guide to first cameras and creative tech for kids covers the wider options. There is even a LeapFrog Lilypad, which is either a brilliant joke or a sign that nobody at the toy company watched the film. I have not decided.

For the actual tablet question the movie raises, our family tablet guide is the practical follow-up.

📺 Movie night sorted: if your family runs out of things to watch after this one, Prime Video’s 30-day free trial is an easy way to line up the next few weekends, no commitment.

Is Toy Story 5 worth watching?

Yes. We rate it 4.5 out of 5. It takes a while to get going, but the second half is the warmest stretch of Toy Story since Part 3, and the animation is among the best Pixar has ever produced. It is a clear step up from Toy Story 4.

Is Toy Story 5 OK for young kids?

Yes. It is rated PG for some thematic elements and rude humor, and it is the gentlest film in the series. There is nothing like Sid’s mutant toys, the Toy Story 3 incinerator or the Toy Story 4 ventriloquist dummies. We still recommend it from about 6, because the slow first half and the screen-time theme land best with kids old enough to follow and talk about them.

Do you need to watch the other Toy Story movies before Toy Story 5?

No. The film works on its own, and a child who has never seen the earlier ones will follow it fine. Parents who grew up with Woody and Buzz get extra emotional payoff, but it is a bonus, not a requirement. Our Toy Story series guide covers the rest if you want them.

Where can I watch Toy Story 5?

Toy Story 5 streams on Disney+ since September 23, 2026. It was released digitally on August 18, 2026, and on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD on September 22, 2026, after opening in theaters on June 19, 2026.

What is Lilypad in Toy Story 5?

Lilypad is a frog-themed tablet voiced by Greta Lee that Bonnie receives as a gift. Bonnie gets hooked on it and stops playing with her toys, which is the problem Jessie and the gang have to solve.

How long is Toy Story 5?

Toy Story 5 runs 102 minutes, which is comfortably within a family movie night before bedtime.