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.
Bonnie loves making her toys kiss each other. (So, too, do screenwriters Stanton and Kenna Harris, who sideline Buzz with an excruciating subplot about his urge to propose to Jessie.) But around kids her own age, Bonnie is so timid she becomes aggravating to watch. Many scenes grind to a halt with the shy girl too terrified to speak. The first time, you’re empathetic. By the fourth, you don’t want to play with her either.
When Jessie climbs onto a roof to survey the cause of her owner’s maladjustment, she sees a neighborhood of silent, stationary children sucked into their online devices. “Why are they just sitting there doing nothing?” Jessie asks, with the innocence of someone first unboxed by a boomer. In return, Wi-Fi-enabled invaders like Lilypad barely recognize her as a source of entertainment. Jessie whines about the good old days all the time — how fun is that? Similarly, Woody, who rode off into the sunset in the last entry and here returns with a weather-beaten bald spot, gets treated like a human grandpa shrunk down to doll-size.
Nevertheless, Bonnie’s doting parents hope that Lilypad will help Bonnie make friends, oblivious to how the gizmo — and soon, their daughter — vibrates with anxiety. Melodramatic and hyper-distracted, Lilypad insists that Bonnie will remain a pariah unless she wins over her peers’ snotty group chat. The movie briefly introduces us to that clique: dreadful girls who greet Bonnie with a listless, tone-perfect “Hey.” Still, I suspect if the script spent any time with them, they’d reveal themselves to be lonely too.
Modern gadgets are damaging our ability to daydream, socialize and perceive the physical world. Even the adults are too absorbed by their screens to notice a herd of dolls stampeding through a house. When the toys use messaging apps to control their owners in ways that go terrifyingly unnoticed, humankind itself seems to be blundering about with its brain unplugged. (As inadvertent marketing, this week Britain announced a social media ban for kids under 16. Can we expand that to the planet?)
Yet the series allows Lilypad to be a more sympathetic antagonist than the teddy bear it once tied to the grille of a garbage truck in “Toy Story 3.” As much as the movie frets about kids with a death-grip on their technological addiction, it also wants to play in perpetuity on millions of streaming devices, including an officially licensed “Toy Story”-branded tablet. Resistance is futile. Dissonance is real.
Lilypad’s creativity-zapping existence throws off Pixar’s ability to brainstorm a dynamic story. In an effort to lure lonely Bonnie into meeting friends IRL, several scenes center on characters attempting to send or receive an email. Another dramatic moment involves a QR code. Visually, it’s as riveting as it sounds.
But there are a few inspired sight gags: a stuffed pony galloping on a real horse, a tutu-clad tough guy named Combat Carl (Ernie Hudson), Forky’s pipe cleaner arms sliding down his thorax. The scene-stealer is a digital bathroom training device, Smarty Pants (Conan O’Brien), with animated toilet paper rolls for eyes and a potty mouth that’s much filthier than you expect for a Pixar movie. Repetitive as his jokes get, he’s terrific when his battery runs low, forcing him to wobble hungover-like through a kitchen before plopping face-first in a dog bowl.
Designed for obsolescence, Smarty Pants and his friends — Atlas (Craig Robinson), a talking GPS, and Snappy (Shelby Rabara), a toddler’s first camera — measure their lifespan in months, not years. They seem to take it less personally when they’re shoved into a drawer. While their subplot is a worthy ding at today’s avalanche of junk, heaven help us if “Toy Story 6” co-stars an out-of-date cellphone.
Aware that the main action is pretty dull, “Toy Story 5” also includes a shipwrecked platoon of “High-Tech”-edition Buzz Lightyears searching for an excuse to figure into the plot, a survivalist side quest that allows the movie’s own imagination to roam free. Randy Newman’s score even drums up a rousing Viking chant. It’s a reminder that Pixar doesn’t make repetitive sequels because it can’t think of original ideas. The problem is that audiences don’t reliably want to see them. We’ve clung on to these weary toys. Time to let go.
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