Pixar built its next movie around a kid trading her toys for a screen. It’s a franchise staring down its own obsolescence, and a discipline Disney’s Star Wars has never managed.
The villain in Toy Story 5 is a frog-shaped tablet named Lilypad. That detail tells you almost everything about what Pixar is doing here, and why it matters beyond one animated sequel.
When the film opens June 19, Andrew Stanton and co-director McKenna Harris will hand the emotional center to Jessie, not Woody, and point the plot at the one thing every toy in this universe has always feared: a kid who stops playing. Bonnie, now around eight, falls for a glowing screen. The toys become furniture. Fifty commemorative Buzz Lightyears wander a deserted island in demo mode, chanting for a Star Command that no longer needs them.
Strip away the gags and that is a movie about being replaced. A 30-year-old franchise, on its fifth installment, chose to dramatize the exact anxiety that should keep its executives up at night: cultural irrelevance, the moment audiences move on. Pixar did not run from that fear. It built the story on top of it.
That is the move Star Wars keeps failing to make.
The Lesson Isn’t “Bring the Characters Back”
It would be easy to read Toy Story 5 as a nostalgia play, and easy to tell Star Wars it simply needs to round up its old heroes. That reading is wrong, and the proof is Star Wars itself.
The sequel trilogy brought back Luke, Han, and Leia. It put the original cast on screen alongside new leads and let John Williams score the reunion. It did not solve anything. By the time The Rise of Skywalker landed, the three films were visibly arguing with each other about whose story this was, lurching between honoring the legacy heroes and replacing them. The familiar faces were present. The center was not.
Presence is cheap. Pixar is not betting on the fact that Woody and Buzz exist. It is betting that it understands why they ever mattered: the dread of being outgrown, the loyalty that survives it. Lilypad is not a random antagonist. She is that theme made literal. The franchise knows its own emotional engine well enough to aim a whole movie at the place it hurts.
Lightyear Was the Test Pixar Already Failed
Pixar learned this the expensive way, and recently.
Lightyear had the brand. It had a Buzz Lightyear, a Pixar logo, and a summer 2022 release. What it did not have was the bond. Audiences got a sci-fi origin story for a fictional movie that supposedly inspired a toy, with Chris Evans in the role Tim Allen had voiced for decades, set light-years from Andy’s bedroom and the toy-box family that gave the series its weight.
The result: $226 million worldwide against a $200 million budget before marketing, a loss estimated north of $100 million, and layoffs at the studio. Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter later conceded the concept demanded too much of viewers, that it was too abstract a hook to carry a Toy Story title. The name opened the doors. The missing emotional connection emptied the seats.
Toy Story 5 reads as the corrective. Not because it plays safe, a movie about screens displacing childhood play is not a safe pitch, but because it returns to the thing that was load-bearing all along and builds the new idea on top of it.
Star Wars Has Spent a Decade Unsure What It’s About
Now run the same diagnostic on Star Wars.
Rogue One worked. Solo did not. The Han Solo prequel grossed around $393 million on a budget reported near $250 to $300 million, became the first Star Wars film to lose money, and effectively killed the “A Star Wars Story” anthology line. The theatrical strategy never fully recovered; the franchise migrated to Disney+.
Some of what followed is excellent. The Mandalorian gave the brand a genuine hit. Andor is among the best things made under the Lucasfilm banner since 1983. But a strong show is not a center, and the slate as a whole still cannot answer the basic question. Is this saga about Rey? About the legacy trio? About Grogu? About filling gaps between existing films? About moving past the Skywalkers, or returning to them? The answer keeps changing depending on which project ships.
Star Wars has treated the galaxy as the draw: lightsabers, the Force, the iconography people can recite from memory. Pixar understands that the logo is not the heart. The setting is not the attraction. The bond is.
What Pixar Actually Did
The honest version of the lesson is harder than nostalgia and harder than reinvention.
A franchise survives by knowing its emotional center precisely enough to point the story directly at the thing that threatens it. Toy Story 5 did that. It looked at a generation of kids glued to tablets, recognized that as the literal end of the toys’ world, and made that the movie. The fear became the plot. That only works because Pixar never lost the thread of what these characters are for.
Star Wars, by contrast, has spent the Disney era either clutching nostalgia too tightly or sprinting from it, without ever holding the saga’s emotional core steady long enough to build something new from it. Andor proved the talent is there. The strategy around it has not caught up.
No one knows yet whether Toy Story 5 will be good. It could be wonderful or unnecessary. But it walked in knowing the assignment, which is more than the galaxy far, far away can currently say.
A cowboy doll and a plastic space ranger figured out the part Lucasfilm still hasn’t: you can change everything except why people cared.
