Table of Contents
*Warning! Spoilers Ahead. Although seriously, if you don't know the basic plot of a Toy Story movie by now, you really haven't been paying attention. And Toy Story 5 is not exactly The Sixth Sense.
A Trip Down Memory Lane
When Toy Story was first released in 1995, my older son was 2, and my younger son had just recently been born. I think the first one we saw together in a theater was Toy Story 3 (arguably the best in the series), which was released in 2010.
The fifth installment of the franchise was released on June 19, 2026. For both nostalgic and professional reasons, I decided to go to the Village East by Angelika and spend 100 minutes or so hanging out with Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and the rest of the gang. The late afternoon screening was clearly atypical; the theater was largely empty, belying the fact that Toy Story 5 raked in $160 million in its opening weekend in the U.S., and another $150 million or so overseas, giving it the biggest opening weekend of the series (so far; I doubt this is the last one).
The pull of nostalgia is understandable; that is, after all, the main theme in the Toy Story saga. Woody, Jessie, and Bullseye, for instance, are all based on a popular (but imaginary) kids' television program from the 1950s. Even Buzz, who was first introduced as the shiny new toy that threatened to supplant the old-fashioned Woody, is now dealing with the possibility of being replaced by a digital device that can send text and images "to infinity and beyond." The theme of generational change is driven home when a trio of outdated battery-powered(!) tech devices is discovered gathering dust in a junk drawer; obsolescence and corroding batteries are just a product cycle away.
And of course, across the various movies of the franchise, the vocal talents are a catalogue of American entertainment nostalgia: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Joan Cusack, Wallace Shawn (Inconceivable!), Annie Potts, and John Ratzenberger, to name just a few. (The Wikipedia page for the Toy Story franchise has a remarkably detailed list of everyone who has performed in the series.)
How Can I Write Off the Cost of the Ticket?
My professional motivation for seeing the film requires a bit more explanation, much of which is provided by the Disney promotional page for the film:
The toys are back in Disney and Pixar’s “Toy Story 5,” and this time it’s Toy meets Tech. Woody (voice of Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (voice of Tim Allen), Jessie (voice of Joan Cusack) and the rest of the gang's jobs are challenged when they come face-to-face with Lilypad (voice of Greta Lee), a brand-new tablet device that arrives with her own disruptive ideas about what is best for their kid, Bonnie. Will playtime ever be the same?
Before I get into the meat of my commentary, let's pause and take a moment to reflect on the fact that the first Toy Story movie to acknowledge the onslaught of tech was just released 19 years after the late Steve Jobs and Apple shipped "three revolutionary products" crammed into a single device – the iPhone. It is also worth noting that even in Toy Story 5, a summer 2026 hit movie, you barely see any smartphones at all. That may be because Disney hasn't built one yet, but it also has something to do with the fact that the only kids in the movie inhabit a very narrow age range, roughly from 5 to 9 years old. There are no obnoxious tweens or sullen teenagers to make the tech parenting problem even more complicated.
That underscores the fact that the closing question in Disney/Pixar's promotion is wildly outdated. Playtime (and parenting) hasn't been the same for decades, and this film does not grapple with any of the hard questions that parents are actually facing today, like device addiction, sleep deprivation, exposure to inappropriate content, bullying, radicalization, reduced attention span, decreased socialization skills, neck and eye strain, and so on.
I understand, of course, that Toy Story 5 is a children's movie and not a documentary on the perils of devices or social media. Nobody walks into a Pixar film expecting to see The Social Dilemma. And director Andrew Stanton clearly had no interest in that approach. In an interview with Animation World Network, Stanton bluntly summarized the battle between toys and tech: "tech just wins." The issue that drives Toy Story 5, in Stanton's view, is how kids make friends these days.
So, it was really about Bonnie. Bonnie, being at this age where socialization is a big deal and making friends presents high, high stakes. And all the toys have always been surrogate parents. And this device has now come in with a sort of new way of looking at parenting. Everything’s concerned about the betterment of the child. It’s always been the case in all the movies, but now, we just put it front and center. And so that kind of helped us navigate and gave us guidelines about where to emphasize things, where to let things go into the background, and where not to address things. That’s always the arbiter.
Part of the dilemma, as co-director Kenna Harris noted in the same interview, is that the threat to playtime may now be insuperable. In previous Toy Story movies, the toys solved their problem by finding a new child; "[but] with Lilypad," Harris said, "it’s unclear if there is a solve."
Actor Greta Lee (the voice of Lilypad) told Time that she has deployed a countermeasure (though even she calls it a "dam," not a solution): a landline in a common space in her house to help delay smartphone use. But ironically, she saw her role in TS5 as trying to "humanize a tablet."
Lilypad is superfocused on making Bonnie friends [through messaging and games on the tablet]. And that’s exactly what [the doll] Jessie wants too [through imaginative play]. So instead of the binary question of whether streaming, tech, and AI are good or bad—I mean, they’re bad, but as parents we know the conversation doesn’t end there—it was more about being deliberate about, how do you foster real friendship? It’s not necessarily through messaging or games.
Pixar does allude to one of the problems that we are actually facing. There's a powerful visual image in the movie (which Lee referenced in her interview): A panning shot of Bonnie's suburban neighborhood in the early evening shows house after house with young children sitting alone in dark rooms, illuminated only by the glow of their tablets.
Pixar implies that all of those kids are chatting with a parentally-approved list of friends or browsing Lilypad's curated content. But as every parent viewing TS5 knows, that's not our shared reality: Last year, a survey by Common Sense Media found that just over half of children 8 or younger have their own tablet or smartphone. Most of those devices likely have unfettered access to the internet, for good and for ill.
Pixar's refusal to squarely confront the wide-ranging and well-documented dangers of actual child tech use turns TS5 into an exercise in parenting nostalgia, rather than a meaningful exploration of contemporary challenges. Sure, it's worth reminding parents that even in the gated Lilypad chat pond, mean girls are still going to be mean. But boy, that's just the tip of a very big and very challenging iceberg.
Disney/Pixar Soft-Peddles AI (and Drones)
If there is one thing that Disney knows, it's the business of turning human emotions (love, friendship, loss, anxiety, abandonment, jealousy, oversleeping, too many diminutive roommates) into profitable merchandise and services. What started as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in 1923 has transmogrified into an entertainment behemoth. Altogether, the company's parks, movie studios (which include Pixar and Marvel), streaming services, and related businesses generated $94.4 billion in 2025. It's been a pretty good century for the Mouse.
Both in terms of cultural history and economic might, Disney can fairly be described as a Very Big Deal. It is worthwhile, then, to pay attention to both the explicit and implicit ways in which Disney and Pixar (which became a Disney subsidiary in 2006) approach technology and technology-related issues.
AI Ambivalence
Let's look first at the issue of AI. This is a topic that interests Disney for both business and artistic reasons. On May 23, 2025, the company issued a memorandum, simply titled "Artificial Intelligence," in which it declared that:
We embrace the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a tool to benefit our employees, customers, guests, and creators. We are committed to using AI in a responsible, human-centered, and ethical manner that recognizes the value of human creativity.
But as the Wall Street Journal reported (via Futurism), Disney's efforts to use AI in its own creative processes have reportedly met with limited success, both for technical and intellectual property reasons (including tense negotiations with actors over possible misuse of voice talents and facial images). At the same time, Disney joined Universal Studios last summer in suing an image-generating AI startup called Midjourney; the movie companies allege that Midjourney was trained on – and freely regurgitates – their proprietary characters.
Disney's conflicted relationship with AI is all the more ironic given that "artificial intelligence" has actually been a core feature of the Toy Story franchise since the beginning.
After all, from the start, Pixar has depicted the toys as having both intelligence and agency, as long as a human can't see them. That's the grand secret of Toy Story, one that has fueled the franchise through five films over thirty years. But in this latest movie, the character of Lilypad blurs the distinction: while her most agentic and "intelligent" conversations occur with other toys (and the outdated tech), she is designed to interact with a human child (Bonnie) and facilitate communication with Bonnie's fellow pond dwellers. Lilypad doesn't stop working or flop onto the floor when humans are around, and she has no need for their imagination; she contains programmed multitudes.
The term "AI" never appears in Toy Story 5 (again illustrating that Pixar is hearkening back to a kinder, gentler tech era), but it's a bit of a wink to the audience. Three and a half years after the release of ChatGPT, we all see Lilypad for what she is: an AI-enabled device capable of generating text, serving as a software agent, and formulating plans. She's everything that Sam Altman's been promising (and has yet to deliver), but Pixar has no interest in drawing Lilypad with an "AI Inside" sticker. To do so would undercut the overarching conceit: that these toys, and now these devices, are inherently endowed with intelligence. They don't need an algorithm to provide it.
Creeping Drones
Disney/Pixar may have many corporate and artistic reasons to gloss over the implicit AI issue, but its deployment of drone imagery in TS5 crosses the line from casual cybertrope to dystopian normalization.
Let's set the scene. As the movie opens, we see a cargo container that has floated ashore and broken open. Emerging from the container is a drone – yes, that is the collective noun – of second-generation Buzz Lightyears, now featuring electronic chest plates and upgraded B2B (Buzz-to-Buzz) communications. After mistaking a shooting star for a message from Star Command, the drone sets out to find its headquarters, and of course, stumbles across Woody, Jessie, and the OG Buzz along the way.
Low-stakes drama and peril ensue, and eventually, the drone finds itself on the back of a pickup truck with all of our franchise heroes and Lilypad, heading for a donation center. It's her opportunity to show that she's on Team Toy, so she downloads a firmware update for the Buzzes and Bluetooths (Blueteeths?) it to them.
It's a subtly profound moment in the Toy Story universe. Up until that instant, each toy was complete; the only "upgrade" needed was a child's imagination. But now tech has taken over. For years, Andy could pretend to make Buzz fly, but the firmware update installed by Lilypad turns the drone of Buzzes into actual drones. With their newfound flight capability, the drones lift the non-upgraded toys out of the back of the truck and carry them to safety. They celebrate with an aerial light show and speed off into the distance.
The drone show is another delayed depiction of technology by Pixar. Disney first introduced drone shows in 2016, when it put on Starbright Holidays at Disney Springs in Walt Disney World, Florida, with a cluster of Intel-powered devices. There have been a handful of other U.S. shows in the intervening years, including a 2024 Disney Springs show called Disney Dreams That Soar, which featured an image of Buzz Lightyear zooming through the Florida sky. Ironically, Disney has an easier time offering drone shows at its European parks than in America. About two decades ago, the company lobbied the Federal Aviation Administration to impose strict no-fly zones over Disney's parks and in 2003, the FAA agreed.
Had the drone of Buzzes merely zoomed off over the horizon, I wouldn't have written this post. But Pixar dropped a mid-credits scene that was clearly intended to be both heartwarming and intriguing, but instead landed (at least to me) as disturbingly ominous. We see a sunlit playground filled with children, including one sitting all by himself. All of a sudden, one of the flight-enabled Buzzes floats down into his hands. Soon, it is joined by the rest of the drone, with each Buzz gently hovering down into the hands of a new playmate. The scene unfolds with zero parental consent and barely any adult involvement; in fact, the only adult on the playground is delighted to get his own Buzz. Then, a chill: a child pulls Zurg out of their backpack. "We meet again, my son." (Let the countdown until Toy Story 6 begin.)
The image of drones floating down toward happy children on a playground, however, should not be normalized. It was reminiscent of the gruesome scene imagined by Suzanne Collins toward the end of Mockingjay, the final book of The Hunger Games trilogy, when supposedly beneficent gifts float down toward dozens of children, only to explode, maim, and kill upon landing. Social media channels (all available on unguardrailed devices) contain imagery and discussion of drones similarly deployed in Ukraine, Russia, Lebanon, and other troubled hotspots around the world. The mid-credits scene launders that visual vocabulary: images associated in news broadcasts and social media feeds with ordnance and destruction are repackaged as innocent benevolence.
The laundering works. There was no audible reaction from the admittedly small audience, and in my research into other TS5 reviews, no one else has read the scene as I have. Perhaps I'm an outlier. But I firmly believe we should not become inured to what Disney/Pixar is selling here. These are not gifts from a mythical Santa Claus, the Good Samaritan, or even Star Command. These toys are part of a corporate onslaught that relentlessly pushes the idea that algorithms and surveillance tech are both necessary and beneficial.
Schools Should Be Drone-Free
Perhaps I would not have reacted so strongly to the ending of Toy Story 5 if I had not been following a new trend over the past several months: the deployment of drone technology on K-12 campuses around the country.
Predictably, the sales pitches and budget rationales all center on student safety. Justin Marston, the CEO of Texas-based Campus Guardian Angel, told a Florida television station (WCTV) last summer that the drones can serve as a rapid-response force in emergencies (such as an armed shooter).
"To have an elite air force that’s standing by to jump in at five seconds notice to try save your kid’s life," Marston said, "I think most citizens, most parents would want that type of capability."
The company's website says its offering is based on three pillars: an "elite team," apps to improve "situational awareness," and "drones that distract, disorient, confront, degrade, and incapacitate a shooter."
This section will expand into its own detailed post in the future, but let me close with a few quick thoughts.
First, it's worth noting that Marston and his colleagues have clearly watched some of the same videos echoed by the TS5 mid-credits scene. As he pointed out to WCTV:
Seeing how effective these things are in Ukraine against people with guns and saying, ‘Well hey, if we could turn that into a managed service that’s delivered from a centralized op center similar to the Predator mission in the war on terror, then we could have an expert team centrally and give every SRO in Florida, every SRO in Texas a magic button.'
It's more than a little disconcerting that battlefield tech is the new standard for public school safety. I'm definitely not so sure that "most parents" would want their children attending a school patrolled with drones with sub-lethal weapons, even if controlled by the most well-trained professionals. I doubt that there's been much polling on that yet, but I'm sure it will be done.
Second, even if the drones are not randomly targeting children (a reasonable assumption, I suppose), there is the legitimate risk of mission creep. I've been studying the impact of technology on various aspects of society for more than three decades, and there is one constant: if a tool can be used for data collection and surveillance, it will be. The collection and analysis of data are two of the most easily rationalized activities for district officials and building administrators, particularly if there is any remote safety hook. Drone patrols would almost certainly become routine, particularly since AI can be used (as it already is) to analyze what is being seen in real time.
Finally, some more philosophical questions: What are we teaching our children if their schoolwork is being done against the persistent Buzz of Cyclopean devices? What kind of citizens are we raising? Law enforcement agencies around the country are already spending millions on drone technology to surveil the people and vehicles in their jurisdictions.
Is the goal of K-12 education to produce Judge Dredd-compliant members of society, or to help students develop the independence and critical-thinking skills necessary to question the Panopticon?
