Toy Story 5

Pixar's longest-running franchise is back for round five. The official trailer for Toy Story 5 dropped on February 19th, and while the teaser back in November leaned into INXS' "Never Tear Us Apart" as a statement of loyalty between toys and their kids, this full trailer takes a decidedly different tonal approach, trading a trailer deep in its feels for one that pivots towards a near-manic declaration of war against screens.

Bonnie, first introduced in 2010’s Toy Story 3, is now eight and all but enraptured by a frog-shaped smart tablet named Lilypad (Greta Lee)—and you can imagine how the other toys feel about it.

The trailer opens with Bonnie in full play mode with her toys—with a faux-watercolour treatment alongside her voiceover, as the obvious Mendelssohn “Wedding March” plays. This is followed by a classic “dun dun dunnnn” sting at 0:20 as we’re introduced to Lilypad. At 0:25 Rex offers a great one-liner (“Extinction! Not again!”) before a modern vamp enters with light strings and percussion, as we see Bonnie already zoning out on her new device.

At 0:50 we hear a tonal shift to something more musically dramatic, in tandem with the shift to a nighttime reconnaissance between Jessie and Woody—clearly, she’s looking for reinforcements in this burgeoning fight for Bonnie’s attention. They agree on what we’ve known for some time—that tech has come for us all. Ponderous piano and plaintive strings accompany Jessie’s sigh of resignation. Cue, at 1:15, Randy Newman’s isolated vocal! “You got a friend in me,” he jubilantly offers, which is a paean from the mid-90s. Then comes a calling for Woody (Tom Hanks), now sporting a poncho and conspicuously “balding”, called back from his life at the end of Toy Story 4 to help lost toys. At 1:27 we’re treated to another call back to the first Toy Story, as Buzz reenacts the scene from that film where he first meets Woody; this is accompanied, of course, by a light version of the instrumental opening to “You Got a Friend in Me”, mildly trailerized with strings and orchestral flourishes—nostalgia doled out in bits and pieces, unapologetically blatant, yet measured.

At least, that is, until 1:44—after a couple of teases, a fully orchestral version of “You Got a Friend in Me” accompanies an action montage sequence as we get a preview of the struggle the toys will face against LilyPad—a microcosm of the broader, all-too-familiar generational struggle that children undeniably have with electronics today. “Times may change, but friends are forever,” the title cards promise.

At least it can be said that Pixar knows nostalgia is its biggest play in the fifth iteration of a series spanning over thirty years, and it plays it well. Newman’s voice almost carries this thing by itself—but is it earned?

Toy Story 5 reaches theatres June 19th.

— Curtis Perry