In 2007, the introduction of the iPhone fundamentally changed the nature of childhood. Chat, cameras, YouTube, scrolling, Instagram, hyperconnection, Roblox, all easily yanked out of a pocket and set up at the dinner table. No one was ready. The dopamine hit was instant. Social norms went out the window.
Nearly 20 years later, Toy Story 5 asks: Will we do anything about that? In forcefully asking the question — and pointing fingers at the adults in the room who brought us to this moment — directors Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris have turned the fifth movie in a three-decade-old franchise, destined to make $1 billion worldwide, the most responsive and vital film produced by an American studio in this century.
A cheeky scolding wouldn’t earn that distinction. But Toy Story 5 goes deeper — a referendum on child-rearing in the digital age, an ode to the power of play with radical new context, and a plea to kids over what they’ll see when they look up from their screens. And through it all, in a refreshing twist, Toy Story 5 refuses to blame the kids. The lead human character, Bonnie, isn’t weak or broken; she’s an 8-year-old responding exactly as Lilypad, the stand-in iPad, was designed to make her respond.
Stanton and Harris confront a harder truth: The adults, loving, caring, present during the day, scrolling on their phones at night, are the ones who failed to understand the technology they handed their daughter.
Bonnie, a victim
Toy Story 5 had to go for the throat of Big Tech. Just as Joe Camel peddled cigarettes in the 1980s, every Silicon Valley startup and mega-corp has found a way to mesmerize our kids. Devices are omnipresent — at home, at school — the apps are bubbly, and the Target toy aisles are filled with Skibidi Toilet and Ms. Rachel merch. So it’s not surprising that pitting Jessie, Woody, and Buzz against Lilypad, the spiffy new Kindle Fire equivalent that immediately zombifies Bonnie, feels “familiar” to many critics. In the wake of tech-domination satire like Her, Eighth Grade, Black Mirror, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, and 2026’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, many think Toy Story 5 “doesn’t have much to offer” beyond reminding us “Phone Bad Actually.”
These obtuse readings of Stanton and Harris’ film are, I am sorry to say, the effect of a culture dulled down by alarm. We (society) did not account for the smartphone cultural shift, and we have yet to reckon with what our kids encounter in the thorny wild of the internet. Today’s parents fixate on kids eating the right vegetables and averting the dangers of walking home from school, but watching Kick streamers get arrested live on camera is fine, I guess? “My kid likes Minecraft and they play Minecraft there” does a lot of heavy lifting. Toy Story 5 argues that this ignorance — not Bonnie’s fascination with Lilypad — is the real crisis.
That’s what makes Jessie such a fascinating, reimagined protagonist. She’s the first to realize Bonnie is disappearing, but she responds like a panicked parent: get rid of the screen, restore the old normal, make Bonnie play the “right” way. Stanton and Harris ultimately argue that’s the wrong instinct. Jessie has correctly diagnosed the problem but misunderstood the cure. Parents can’t solve a technological problem by pretending technology doesn’t exist. At some point, we all have to learn what “brainrot” means if we are to parent in modern times.
Like Stanton’s own Wall-E, which suddenly looks like a sequel to Toy Story 5, we pick up with Jessie and Buzz in a grim world in which physical playtime is going extinct and Woody spends his days rescuing toys abandoned for “tech.” The social commentary only gets more vicious. Kids sit in dark rooms illuminated by the blue glows of screens, while parents doomscrolls in their recliners. The opening, in which we zoom through an interconnected Extremely Online neighborhood as Bonnie’s parents address her lack of social circle by gifting her a tablet, plays like the first five minutes of Up, only anyone in the audience with a 5G connection in their pocket are the ones who wind up dead.
In a dumber movie, the premise could feel like a sorry excuse to get Mr. Potato Head cracking in-my-day jokes about how you fit Cathode Ray Tubes into tiny TVs or whatever. But Stanton and Harris point fingers at the parents who enable Big Tech with the same bark of Michael Moore incriminating the gun industry in the deaths of school shooting victims in his 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine. The targets: anyone complicit in “The Great Rewiring of Childhood.”
Pixar marches directly into America’s biggest parenting fight
“The Great Rewiring of Childhood” is the term Jonathan Haidt coined in 2024’s The Anxious Generation, which was enough of a hit that a fraction of book club readers spent the next two years shouting about it on Facebook. After poring over historical sales data and health studies, Haidt came to a conclusion most of us with children already knew in our bones: that the adoption of ever-present, social-media-enabled devices caused a massive spike in anxiety and depression in Gen Z children, adolescents, and young adults starting around 2012. Millions of years of “play-based childhood,” running free in the backyard, playing bank robbers with the Woody dolls of the world, had come to an abrupt stop by the mid-2010s as virtual spaces enabled anyone with a device to connect to like-minded people around the world. Or in their own neighborhoods — you don’t need to walk five blocks away for a playdate when you have Fortnite. Socializing cratered and social anxiety rose, especially, as Haidt notes, for young women who mature (and feel social pressure) much earlier.
Haidt, who it’s worth noting has courted his own controversies over the years, isn’t the only one beating the maybe-wait-a-few-years-before-giving-your-kid-a-phone drum (for a 2026 example, try Michaeleen Doucleff’s Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods). Plenty of (loud) people are also pushing back. As Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in Congressional testimony, he and his fellow social media leaders have definitely screwed with the brains of children and put them in harm’s way over the last 20 years — but hey, they’ll look into fixing that. Meanwhile, current attempts by Congress to build walls around sectors of the internet has resulted in the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, which is rapidly moving forward while raising approximately 8 billion censorship concerns and vilifying the idea of keeping kids safe online. Then there are Very Online Adults (TikTok influencers, op-ed writers) who don’t believe for one second that kids could possibly become addicted to screens because of one notable outlier study and, I dunno, a need for subscribers on Substack from what I can tell.
On the spectrum of “relocate to a cabin off the grid and live off beans” and “X.com is good for kids actually according to Grok but I refuse to prove my thesis also I don’t have kids,” I learn more toward regulation than capitulation, even as a proponent of screen-based culture. With all due respect to Christopher Nolan, I require a phone and preferably a decent one that can map the fastest route to Stop & Shop. My kid will have one too, one day — it’s [Thanos voice] inevitable. But Haidt’s numbers on child depression, which span the globe and appear unique, even in contrast to previous decades of social upheaval, are convincing. I’m even more swayed on the urgency to do something, anything, by Toy Story 5, which wrangles those statistics, then reframes the conversation.
The arc of Jessie scrambling to find glued-to-tablet Bonnie IRL friends, going to war with Lilypad, then working together with technology to pull the girl out of her depressive spiral, has been criticized for being too kind to Big Tech. But it both harkens back to the tradition of the franchise and reframes the debate in an urgent way. Screen time regulations have their place, but this is a movie about screen literacy, and how we can exist on the slippery slope of a forever-connected world.
Across three decades, the Toy Story films have returned again and again to the importance of play, and why it must endure even as the world changes around it. The original Toy Story was born from technological disruption itself — a groundbreaking CGI movie about Woody, an old-fashioned cowboy toy, confronting Buzz Lightyear, the flashy new arrival with a laser little lightbulb that blinks. In the end, new did not defeat old, nor did old bury new. Everything could coexist in the ecosystem of a child’s imagination. Each sequel expanded that theme. Toy Story 2 rejects the temptation to preserve childhood in amber through a fanboy collector. Toy Story 3 treats change as a kind of death and rebirth, as Andy moves on and the toys discover new purpose. Even the tepid Toy Story 4 asked whether purpose itself can evolve beyond the role we were created to play.
In a way, Toy Story 5 goes full circle, with Jessie facing Lilypad much as Woody once faced Buzz: another seemingly superior replacement. When left in Bonnie’s room, Lilypad is much more vile than Buzz, unlocking game loops and online bullying, and displacing human connection even in her own home. Jessie witnesses the destruction, but she can’t rescue her kid, parent her kid, without seeing Lilypad as more than a time-waster device.
Early in Toy Story 5, you weep for Bonnie. Her well-meaning parents appear to do zero research into the Lilypad, then make a grave mistake handing her an internet-enabled device without investigating the safety settings, chat functions, or deep well of slop games. A screentime limit — which Bonnie doesn’t abide by when she starts cheering up and connecting with “friends” — is their only, insufficient guardrail against a complete brain cave-in. (Imagine if Pandora had only opened her box for 30 minutes a day!)
While Lilypad opens doors for the 8-year-old, they quickly slam on her face, as she’s tortured at a sleepover for “still playing with toys,” a pastime she loves. She’s only eight! As Dr. Jean Twenge writes in her book iGen and across a vast body of psychology work, this is a classic example of forced maturity in our digital era. Kids weaned on technology operate on an entirely new maturation cycle, which then pressures kids who aren’t even that online to give up on their own development cycles to keep up. Bonnie’s parents, on their own phones half the time, don’t have a clue that any of this is happening until the end of the movie. Thank god for the sentient stuffed cowgirl Andy donated to Bonnie two movies ago.
Stanton and Harris are skilled filmmakers who keep Toy Story 5 from zipping off a didactic cliff, including a visually stunning escapade involving a fleet of lost Buzz toys and just the right amount of Forky. Through those potent visuals, they also speak to children in the audience: despite spending most of the time cracking up, my older daughter turned to me during Bonnie’s more vacant moments to say, “That’s not me… that’ll never be me.” Toy Story 5 will likely hold the highest Rotten Tomatoes score of any Scared Straight PSA.
Jessie learns what parents need to learn
But it’s in the back half of the movie, when Bonnie accidentally connects with a 9-year-old named Blaze, that Stanton and Harris speak directly to all the parents and hope kids remain on board. Through plot contrivances (that’s life), Jessie, the proxy for adults spinning wheels in Anxious Generation-inspired Facebook threads, winds up at Blaze’s house, which also happens to be the farm of her former owner Emily. The sense memories of the Old Times, sun-drapped Kinkandian dreams of twirling around by the tire swing, only makes her quest to save Bonnie from digital quicksand more urgent.
But that combined swirl of nostalgia and tech-induced rage causes Jessie to overlook that Blaze might be the ideal child: a horse girl with a laptop in her room who does not seem to have descended into complete madness. In fact, she loves to play, and can do so on her own, even when her dad is yapping all afternoon on a Zoom call. Bonnie and Blaze are a perfect match who only come together because a parent (in this case, Jessie) uses the internet for good.
Eventually, Bonnie’s parents catch up to Jessie. They never really wonder how Blaze made contact with their 8-year-old daughter, who she had never met, or how Jessie wound up a few miles away on a farm, but they wake up to the fact that relying on a tablet to guide their child’s social ascent was “a whoopsie.” They quickly turn off the chat function so the mean girls of Bonnie’s dance class stop tormenting her with photos of crying babies. At least they figured it out before Bonnie turned 16 and was dealing with revenge porn.
Does Lilypad deserve a redemption arc or is its mere existence an affront to the ideal childhood? Igniting the debate is more than most filmmakers are willing to bring to the table when hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line. Stanton took a similar leap with Wall-E, which gives all of humanity a second chance to regrow a decimated Earth into a green world they can either prosper in or screw up again. Stanton wants to believe that, if given the chance, we’d make the right decision.
Toy Story 5 ends with Bonnie and Blaze playacting Jessie and Buzz’s wedding. Lilypad is there to snap photos. We won’t know what happened to all the other kids we saw glued to their phones earlier in the film, or the adults so glued to their phones they didn’t notice their kids glued to their phones (or a pack of roving Buzz Lightyears riding on horseback through the living room). But Bonnie snapped out of it — and so did her parents. They all stopped for two seconds to look inward without the help of 24-hour news networks or endless scroll feeds or Reddit parenting groups or TikTok explainers explaining the crisis or even best-selling parenting books that proclaim to have the 5-step solution to saving our souls. They just talked to their kid, found out what her device did, and opted out of the vortex. They let her play.
Jessie also overcame her own doubt of uselessness. The effort of parenting, often crushing, will always be worth the effort in the long run. A parent who is interested in what their kids do, how they think, and what challenges they’ll face, is one who will make an impact even when it feels like the children are “moving on.” It’s when we let young people descend fully into their own worlds — screens or otherwise — and operate without a sense of literacy for the world that we’ve failed them. They won’t always love us as hard as we love them, but as Toy Story 5 accurately presents, they will carry our love forever.
Tech can threaten that communication depending on what it’s used for. Which makes Toy Story 5’s message beyond urgent: As we finally begin to understand the internet our children have inhabited for nearly two decades, the ground is shifting again. Generative AI has become a companion for millions of kids, putting education at risk. Meanwhile, we’re still struggling over how long a kid can watch YouTube without wanting to become an influencer when they grow up. The slippery slope of life with tech is getting slippier.
Even the critics who are down on Toy Story 5 are right about one thing: The Toy Story movies have been serving that same lesson for 30 years. Kids need play — to feel the awe of life around them. And in 2026, it’s still exactly what we all need to hear.
Toy Story 5 is in theaters now.
