Reading Cinemas Newmarket was electric on Tuesday night. Families – children, parents, grandparents – filed into the Titan Luxe for an exclusive Brisbane preview of Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story 5, the long-awaited fifth instalment of one of cinema’s most beloved franchises. The atmosphere in the foyer was warm and buzzing, the kind of collective anticipation that’s increasingly rare in a world of streaming and on-demand everything. And for once, the film delivered everything that anticipation promised.
This time, the threat to Bonnie’s toy room isn’t a doll collector, a theme park, or the looming spectre of growing up. It’s a tablet. Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee) is a frog-shaped smart device with her own very confident ideas about how Bonnie should be spending her time — and the arrival of this sleek, glowing intruder sets the entire film in motion. Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and Jessie (Joan Cusack) must now navigate a world where the very concept of play is being redefined and where their relevance — their reason for being — is genuinely in question.
It is, on the surface, a story for children. But Toy Story 5 is quietly one of the most perceptive films about modern parenthood made in years.
A Franchise That Earns Its Place
What the Toy Story series has always understood — and what director Andrew Stanton (WALL•E, Finding Nemo) understands more deeply than almost anyone working in animation — is that children and adults deserve equal respect in the cinema. These are not films that condescend. They do not simplify. They trust their audiences — all of them — to feel something real.
Toy Story 5 honours that tradition completely. For younger viewers, the film is a relentless, colourful adventure packed with movement, humour and imagination. For adults, it offers something slower and more resonant – a meditation on what we lose when screens replace shared experience and on the strange grief of watching childhood change in real time.
The genius of the screenplay (by Stanton and co-director Kenna Harris) is that these two experiences are never in conflict. The film never lectures. It never wags its finger at the phone in your pocket. It simply shows you, through Jessie’s increasingly desperate attempts to connect with Bonnie, what is at stake – and trusts you to feel it.
New Characters That Earn Their Keep
New additions to the franchise are always a risk. Toy Story 5 takes several swings and lands almost all of them.
Conan O’Brien is an absolute revelation as Smarty Pants, a gloriously useless toilet-training tech toy who arrives in the toy room convinced of his own indispensability. O’Brien brings a particular kind of deranged self-confidence to the role – equal parts oblivious and oddly charming – and his scenes with Jessie are among the film’s most consistently funny. Bad Bunny, meanwhile, turns up as Pizza with Sunglasses: a mysterious, effortlessly cool presence who says very little and means a great deal. And Alan Cumming delivers a wonderfully unhinged cameo as Evil Bullseye in a playtime imagination sequence that is completely absurd and completely wonderful.
These characters work because they’re not just comic relief — each one says something about how children relate to the toys in their lives, and what those relationships reveal about the children themselves.
The Animation Is a New High
It would be easy to take Pixar’s technical achievements for granted at this point, but Toy Story 5 genuinely pushes the boundaries of what animated film can look like.
The production team developed a unique handmade, pastel chalk aesthetic for Bonnie’s imagination sequences — a visual language that feels tactile and slightly rough-edged, like a child’s arts and crafts project come to life. Against the photorealistic warmth of the film’s domestic interiors, these sequences feel genuinely otherworldly. They are melodramatic, funny, and startlingly beautiful.
The real-world environments, meanwhile, have never looked better. The textures of the toy room — wood, carpet, fabric, plastic — are rendered with a level of detail that rewards the big screen. This is emphatically a film to see in the cinema.
The Music
Randy Newman, scoring his fifth Toy Story film, remains as essential to this world as Woody’s pull-string. His themes for Jessie carry a particular weight in this instalment — there is a tenderness in the score that mirrors the character’s emotional arc and a quiet grandeur to the orchestral swells that land exactly as they always have.
Then there is Taylor Swift, who contributes the original song “I Knew It, I Knew You”, co-written with Jack Antonoff. Inspired by Jessie’s journey and delivered in a style that marks a genuine return to Swift’s country roots, the song is warm, emotionally precise, and deeply fitting. It is a better Pixar song than anyone had a right to expect.
Why It Matters
Films like Toy Story 5 do something that very few pieces of popular culture manage: they create genuine common ground between generations. Sitting in that cinema on Tuesday night, watching a room full of children and their parents react to the same moment — a joke, a scare, a quietly devastating emotional beat — was a reminder of what cinema is for.
The film’s central message — that some of life’s greatest joys are found not through devices but through shared experience, imagination, and human connection — is delivered with warmth rather than judgment. It is not a film about bad technology. It is a film about irreplaceable things.
Filled with colour, joy, humour, heart, and satisfying resolutions, Toy Story 5 is a triumph. At 102 minutes, it earns every one of them.
★★★★★
Toy Story 5 is in Australian cinemas now.
Rated G | Consumer Advice: Very mild bullying themes and violence | Runtime: 102 minutes
Directed by Andrew Stanton | Co-directed by Kenna Harris | Produced by Jessica Choi
Screening attended: Exclusive Brisbane Media Preview, Reading Cinemas Newmarket, Tuesday 16 June 2026.
