Toy Story 5
Director: Andrew Stanton
Cert: G
Starring: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Greta Lee, Conan O'Brien,Tony Hale, Craig Robinson, John Ratzenberger
Running Time: 1 hr 42 mins
Early on in the latest attempt to keep air in the Toy Story balloon, the gang encounter a collection of battered playthings abandoned outside their sometime owner’s home. That child, like so many others, now devotes all attention to one type of screen or other. When our old friends express surprise, the forgotten toys note: “But it’s been going on for years!”
Well, quite. It feels late in the day to be casting a tablet as the villain. There are, after all, married couples with children who grew up with iPads and their imitators. Indeed, much of Toy Story 5 plays like an old-bloke rant in a mid-market UK tabloid. Go outside and kick a ball. We knew how to use our imagination as kids. Whither went the whistle of the friendly milkman?
As if to encourage such facetious variation, Woody now has a paunch and a bald patch. Many among the veteran voice talent speak with audible creaks and whistles. (Others are dead.) Pixar need not worry. The fifth film in its founding franchise will play merrily to millions of children, but the sense of dying light here is ever so slightly unsettling.
As with the fourth episode , which followed the apparent completion of a neat trilogy, the characters require a few vigorous kicks into narrative action. Woody, who is working elsewhere with Bo-Beep, is eventually dragged back to the old crew as Jessie, now head toy in young Bonnie’s house, deals indifferently with the arrival of a frog-based tablet called Lilypad.
Rather than making friends in the real world, Bonnie contents herself with accumulating likes from icons representing remote Lilypad users. Voiced with deceptive sweetness by Greta Lee, Lily, as we come to know the tablet, engineers the dispatch of Jessie and sets about making the rest irrelevant. “Extinction? Not again!” Rex the dinosaur exclaims.
There are some good gags here about the evolution of the tech-based toy. Rudimentary diversions such as a potty-training computer game called Smarty Pants find themselves no less redundant than the hula hoop. The Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton, returning as director and co-writer, also does decent work with a series of fantasy sequences that illustrate how children’s minds work when they integrate apparently ill-matched toys into creative play.
Less successful is a baffling subplot about a whole squadron (a legion? a flock?) of contemporary Buzz Lightyear dolls descending on distant suburbia.
The slavish devotion that Woody, Buzz and Jessie show to their “kids” remains an irritating flaw in the otherwise durable playbook; they are not so much pals as forelock-tugging factotums. But one cannot reasonably argue with a formula that has lasted so successfully for so long. The animation continues to be a marvel, now accommodating flesh and fluid as it could not on Toy Story’s release in 1995. Randy Newman’s music still weaves poignancy in with frivolity.
There is, however, no escaping a sense that the franchise is getting squeaky around its middle-aged joints. Both Toy Story 4 and this fifth episode feel like small-screen spin-offs (as, let us not forget, the wonderful Toy Story 2 was originally intended) from a weightier cinema presence.
That may not matter in a summer that is currently offering little else of quality to the discerning young person. The gags are plentiful. Old pals are still upright. But the sense of a finger wagging throughout can’t help but temper some of the fun.
As Buzz and Woody waft through middle America, children are seen hunched zombie-like over tablets, phones and laptops. One imagines the voice of a tellyphobic parent from 60 years ago. “Watch any more of that and your eyes will turn square!” Ah, give it a rest, Dad!
Opens in cinemas on Friday, June 19th, with previews from Thursday, June 18th
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