Bob Iger was clearly embarrassed by the number.

When the newly re-enthroned CEO of Disney announced Toy Story 5, he couldn’t bring himself to say the number. This isn’t a franchise that’s been bled white. It’s a franchise that has had its last remaining drops of vital fluid mechanically recovered.

There are absolutely no new ideas here whatsoever. The child’s love of toys as part of the circle of life has been examined, dissected, dismembered and reassembled again. Toys are part of the bright new world when you are young and everything is happiness, energy, and pain is just a skinned knee. Then it’s all about, “when I became a man I put away childish things.” They are abandoned because you must give up the easy pleasures of childhood.

Then you have children of your own and experience that joy again vicariously. There is a third part to the story which I think Toy Story 5 in an early iteration was going to examine but then in purest Disney fashion whizzed right down its leg. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Toy Story is the foundational narrative of Pixar Studios. John Lasseter pitched the original idea to then CEO of Disney, Ron Miller. It was greeted with an “I don’t get it.” The pitch meeting was cut short and John Lasseter was shitcanned before he got back to his office. Seriously, Lasseter’s boss met him at the front door of his building at Disney Burbank and handed him a box with his stuff in it.

Parking lot. Car. Goodbye. You are fired!

With literally nothing else to do that weekend, Lasster attended a conference on CG animation that weekend on the Queen Mary. A friend came up and asked him how his Brave Little Toaster project was doing. Lasseter told him. His friend said, ‘wait right, don’t move a muscle’, and ran off to find a phone. When John Lasseter’s friend came panting back up to him with a huge smile on his face, he asked, “How would you like to work for LucasFilm?”

Pixar started life as LucasFilm’s computer animation division. And one particularly ugly divorce later George Lucas was selling off Pixar for a song to a Steve Jobs who suddenly had a LOT of time hands. It was a perfect fit. Steve Jobs was an artist who was raised by a focused craftsman-woodworker, who was also an expert at flipping cars - this tells you literally everything about Steve Jobs.

Pixar was a perfect fit for Jobs. And Lasseter was Job’s ideal pointman. Toy Story started as a half hour TV show that ballooned into a 40 minute special then an 80 minute theatrical. The hero of the story was Jeff Katzenberg who turned the original treatment into an Enemies-to-Brothers bromance which immediately captivated its audience of young Millennial boys.

It’s now thirty years later and boys are not welcome, Buzz and Woody are barely tolerated retirees invited to the social function only because it’s an unavoidable obligation. Jessie is now the star of the show and her unresolved trauma with Emily remains unresolved because they need to keep something in reserve for Toy Story 6.

Let’s get the good out of the way. I will grant that it is there. It’s not a boring movie, that’s nice. The animation meets Andew Stanton’s high standards. Stanton, the Finding Nemo director who Bob Iger brought back to Pixar by begging on his knees, delivered. He and Pete Docter remain the only studio founders remaining and you can see a hint of the old Pixar magic in certain scenes of this flick. There is a pet pig named Jimmy Deen and it gets awkward for Jessie when she realizes the implications of that name. That scene was funny. It wasn’t worth the considerable price of admission but it was funny. And there were a bunch of other scenes like that. Funny? Yes. But does it even get close to what Pixar used to be able to do? No.

It’s competent but if films came in standard deviations I would have to rate Toy Story 5 as being one standard deviation below Toy Story 3.

Although it’s better than Toy Story 4, I have to give it that.

However, Toy Story 4 is one of the worst films Pixar ever made so let’s not be too impressed by that.

The PLOT

Remember Toy Story 3? That’s the plot. The world is changing and toys have to deal with their worst fear; abandonment. You pretty much get the entire plot from the trailer. Bonnie is given a new toy, a Liliy Pad, which is basically a jailed iPad. Bonnie’s parents tell her they are going to limit her screen time and then abandon her to the addiction they introduced her to. Bonnie’s Parents are awful at their jobs.

Lily doesn’t get along well with the other toys and she doesn’t need to, they are all legacy characters from previous movies and are only here for the memberberries. It’s nice to hear John Ratzenberger again, but in this case it feels more like a tired formula, than a hungry studio keeping around a voice actor they’ve come to regard as a good luck charm.

Jessie gets plot connivanced back to the farm where she belonged to her first owner Emily. And here is where the movie seriously stumbles. You can tell that the plot was originally built around a reunion. Bonnie has rejected her toys in favor of tech, which acts as a substitute for Andy’s abandoning his toys in favor of maturity. So Jessie is now abandoned again. What this film was clearly building toward is a scene where Emily, now a grandmother, finds Jessie in the barn and is able to cherish things from her childhood again, she takes up Jessie and loves her again.

Toy Story has already explored childhood. It has already explored growing up. The obvious next step was nostalgia. Grandparents. Memory. Three generations connected by a toy.

Yeah, they chucked that one out because Emily is White. That is definitely the feeling you get from watching this movie. White = bad. The only whites you see are doing something mean.

Anyway, the people who now own Emily’s old farm are the kind of people rural folks have come to absolutely loathe in recent years. The upper middle class urbanites who picked up somebody’s family farm for a song because the Boomer who inherited it wanted to burn his family’s century long investment rather than pass it on due to the fact “I earned it”. The new family constantly lectures their neighbors about environmental issues, regenerative farming, bovine emissions and looking down their noses at them as illiterate hilljacks, because they need their farms to make a profit instead of running them as a “rescue” for livestock.

Bonnie, who appears to be on the spectrum now instead of merely being shy, eventually makes friends with Blaze who now lives on the farm. Blaze is nice enough now and is trying her best to be a country girl but you know her parents are going to turn her into an entitled bitch sooner or later. I feel sorry for Blaze, you can tell she wants to take up barrel racing.

The movie ends with Buzz marrying Jessie, (Buzz is clearly the bride by the way), and Bonnie and Blaze playing with toys instead of tech because they are raising themselves now and I guess, that is indeed better than their parents doing it, that’s for damn sure.

Toy Story 5 isn’t a disaster. It’s something much sadder. It’s a competent, occasionally charming movie that exists for no reason other than that Disney needed it to exist. The magic of the original trilogy came from filmmakers who had something to say about childhood, loss, and love. What Andrew Stanton and company have delivered here is a film that knows all the right notes but has forgotten why the song mattered in the first place. You’ll laugh a few times. You won’t think about it again.

The deeper shame is that there was a real movie buried somewhere in this pitch. A grandmother finding Jessie in a barn. Toys that meant something across three generations. That’s a story worth telling. Instead, Disney flinched from Emily, from a real ending, from anything that might have required the courage to actually finish what Toy Story started. What we got is a film about closure that refuses to close anything.

If you want to feel what Pixar used to be capable of, the genuine gut-punch of a children’s movie that treats its audience like human beings, then dig out Toy Story 3. It ends. Beautifully. On purpose.

That’s apparently a lost art at Pixar.

The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Toy Story 5

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Verdict

The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend

If you’re thinking about seeing this thing watch Toy Story 3 instead.