Name: Toy Story 5
Genre: Animation, Family, Comedy, Adventure
Released: 2026-06-19T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 1 h 42 min
Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Greta Lee, Conan O'Brien

For three decades the Toy Story films have run on a single, quietly devastating engine: the fear of being outgrown. Woody and the gang have survived college boxes, daycare prisons and a tender handoff to a new kid, always losing ground to time. The fifth film changes the opponent. This time the toys are not being replaced by other toys. They are being replaced by a screen.

The rival is Lilypad, a frog-shaped tablet that lands in Bonnie’s room and starts quietly reorganizing her attention. It is the most pointed thing the series has ever done with its own premise. A franchise born from the first fully computer-animated feature now stages a story about animated objects losing a child to a glowing device, the toys made by code set against the screen that code feeds. The trailer plays it almost as a horror beat: Woody and Jessie, seen from behind, staring up at the thing that has their kid.

The casting tells you what kind of threat the film wants Lilypad to be. Greta Lee, fresh from the sort of restrained adult drama that does not usually wander into a Pixar voice booth, plays the tablet. That is a deliberate signal. The device is not built to read as a cackling cartoon villain but as something calm, reasonable and faintly seductive, the voice that always has one more thing to show you. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are back as Woody and Buzz, their double act now carrying the weight of a friendship the audience has aged alongside, and Joan Cusack’s Jessie is pulled to the front of the fight.

Andrew Stanton directs, with McKenna Harris co-directing, and the choice is its own argument. Stanton is the Pixar filmmaker who already made the studio’s defining film about screens swallowing human attention: a near-wordless opening about a lonely machine, followed by a starliner of people too plugged in to look at one another. Handing him a Toy Story about a tablet is not subtle. It puts the franchise’s most explicit screen-skeptic back in the chair for the exact subject he has circled before, after a long stretch away from animated directing. He spent that stretch in live-action and producing, and his return reads less like a victory lap than like a writer going back to finish an argument he never quite closed.

What makes the setup richer than a toys-good, tech-bad sermon is that the series has always understood obsolescence from the inside. Buzz himself began as the new hot gadget that made Woody feel disposable. The films know the shiny arrival is not automatically the enemy; sometimes it is just the next thing the kid loves. The question Lilypad raises is whether a screen can be folded into that same logic the way a space ranger once was, or whether it represents a genuinely different kind of loss, attention that goes somewhere the toys cannot follow.

There is a longer tradition behind all of this. Stories about toys waiting to be loved run from the Velveteen Rabbit to Pinocchio, and they have always turned on the terror of being set aside. What the first Toy Story did was move that old anxiety into the machine age and render it in the very medium that was busy displacing hand-drawn animation. A fifth chapter that names the screen as its antagonist is, in a sense, the franchise interrogating its own origin: the toys built by a disruptive technology, now cast as the side that gets disrupted. Few long-running series get to stage that kind of self-reckoning, and fewer still have the standing to pull it off.

The risk is just as clear. Toy Story 3 gave the saga as complete an ending as American animation has produced, and the fourth film already played like an epilogue to an epilogue. A fifth entry has to answer the suspicion that the story is being kept alive because the brand is too valuable to retire. There is also something convenient about a Disney tentpole, itself destined for a streaming app on a tablet, warning children about tablets. The frog-faced antagonist of the trailer reads broad, and broad is the register in which this franchise has stumbled before. Whether Stanton can make the screen feel like a real adversary rather than a lecture is the whole game.

The voice cast around the leads is deep. Conan O’Brien, Tony Hale’s Forky, Craig Robinson and Ernie Hudson join the newer residents of the playroom, while the legacy bench anchors the world that came before: Annie Potts as Bo Peep, Wallace Shawn’s Rex, John Ratzenberger’s Hamm, Kristen Schaal’s Trixie and Keanu Reeves returning as Duke Caboom. Taylor Swift contributes an original song, “I Knew It, I Knew You,” to the soundtrack. The film runs 102 minutes and comes from Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures.

Toy Story 5 reaches United States theaters on June 19, with most international markets opening across the same week. For a series that has spent its whole life dramatizing what happens when a child moves on, making the rival the very device that does the moving-on is either the sharpest idea the franchise has had in years or the moment it finally repeats itself. The lineage earns it the benefit of the doubt. The screen will settle the rest.