By Jason Osiason

After the last sequel left the series running on fumes, I walked into Toy Story expecting little more than another nostalgic victory lap. Instead, it caught me completely off guard.

This time it’s basically Jessie’s movie. She’s sheriff of Bonnie’s room now, still quietly working through the abandonment thing with her first kid, Emily, that the second movie never let her fully put down. Bonnie gets a tablet for her birthday called Lilypad, a green frog-shaped thing with opinions of her own. Yes, the tablet is a character. Yes, it has a whole personality.

That’s the part that actually got me. This is a premise that could have gone the easy way: tablet bad, toys good, screen is the villain, roll credits. It pointedly refuses to do that. Lilypad gets Bonnie real playdates going through a group chat, and it works, genuinely, for a while. Then the same “friends” she made in that chat turn around and humiliate her in it, and nobody had to write in a bad guy for any of that to land. It perfectly gets how tech movingly reshapes connection without ever villainizing it, which is a much harder trick than just making the tablet evil would’ve been.

Jessie carries the sadder half of the movie. She gets separated from the rest of the toys about a third of the way through and ends up, almost by accident, back at Emily’s old farmhouse. A different family lives there now. Nobody remembers her. Out in the shed is some other kid’s old gadgets: a GPS unit, a camera, a talking potty-trainer. All switched off. None of them thrown away, just replaced the second something newer came along. That’s the whole movie in one image. Bonds don’t usually end. They get phased out and fade from people’s lives without anyone really choosing it, and watching that happen to a shed full of dead electronics somehow made it worse, not better.

I also spent a good chunk of the runtime trying to work out how they animated that potty-trainer’s voice, because Conan O’Brien is doing something genuinely strange and great with it. He’s running on dying batteries when Jessie first finds him, so half his lines come out slurred like he just closed down a bar. It’s the funniest thing in the movie. By a mile, honestly. Conan O’Brien is a comedic bazooka in animation and I hope Pixar keeps giving him things like this.

It’s a fifth movie in a franchise that already ended once, cleanly, and knew it at the time. A story about outgrowing your toys, finally reckoning with whether it’s outgrown itself, and somehow it still sticks the landing. [B+]