Review: AI meets angst in 'Toy Story 5,' in which the gang and the plot feel obsolete
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Smart toys aren’t great for emotional development, but it’d be nice if the playthings of “Toy Story 5” finally wised up.Once again, the franchise finds them horrified to face their obsolescence.
Kids get older; a plastic T.rex stays the same age range.
“Extinction! Not again!” the dinosaur (voiced by Wallace Shawn) bellows.For three decades, Pixar has continued adding shades to the same plot outline like a child with a box of 128 crayons (or a company clinging to its billion-dollar idea).In 1995’s “Toy Story,” Woody the ragdoll cowboy (Tom Hanks) was aghast to get cast aside for the bleeping action figure Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen).
Today, Jessie the cowgirl (Joan Cusack) must fend off Lilypad (Greta Lee), an interactive tablet that can play games, sing karaoke and install existential despair.Director Andrew Stanton does the novelty factor no favors by repeatedly referencing the musical montage from 1999’s “Toy Story 2” that earned sniffles over Jessie’s PTSD from getting discarded.“I can’t go through this again,” she says.
Neither can I, but here we are.Jessie and the gang yearn to gallivant forever in the hands of 8-year-old Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), perhaps the last child in existence still playing with analog toys.A youngster’s imagination inspires the most delightful sequences in the movie with softly animated adventures that pivot in an instant from romance to danger.
In the one that opens the film, Forky (Tony Hale), the googly-eyed spork, marries a plastic knife called Karen Beverly (Melissa Villaseñor), a name so perfectly unmelodious that only a kid, or an adult exceptionally good at thinking like one, could have concocted it.Movies I watched my children play with their toys over many years and multiple ‘Toy Story’ movies.
These are more than just animated characters to me.Bonnie loves making her toys kiss each other.(So, too,...