Toy Story 5 could have made the tablet the villain. It chose not to, and that choice is the most useful thing about it for any parent watching their own child drift from toys to a screen.
I have not seen it. This is not a review, and the plot is not the interesting part anyway. The interesting part is a decision the people who made it have talked about openly, and what it signals to anyone who has watched the same thing at their own kitchen table. So we are clear: everything below about what happens on screen comes from the critics who have seen it, and the claims about why it was made come from the directors.
Pixar made the tablet the antagonist, then refused to make her evil
The premise is “Toy meets Tech”. Bonnie, now eight, is given a frog-shaped tablet called Lilypad, voiced by Greta Lee, and within minutes it is her whole world. It connects her to other children, arranges a sleepover, and leaves Woody, Buzz and Jessie in a heap on the floor. Lily is the antagonist. She is not the bad guy. That gap is the whole point.
Co-director Kenna Harris told Variety that plenty of people at the studio wanted Lily to be a straight villain, and that “it never made sense”, because everyone arrives at this question carrying loaded feelings about devices. Andrew Stanton, who made the screen-sceptical Wall-E nearly twenty years ago, put it the other way round: the device is not going away, it is the norm now, and nobody has worked out how to live with it. So they wrote Lily as well-meaning rather than malicious, and by the end she is the one who helps Bonnie make a real, in-person friend.
What the film shows about a child and a screen
It is not a soft film about screens, which is part of why it works. Bonnie goes glassy and almost zombie-like once Lily arrives. Her parents set screen-time rules and never enforce them. Her dad spends much of the film on his own device, missing what is happening to his daughter. At the sleepover, the other children mock Bonnie for still playing with toys, and she is bullied on the tablet’s built-in social network. Lily, trying to fix it, starts sending messages as Bonnie and has the old toys boxed away.
For the first time in the mainline series the film is rated PG, partly for this. The cyberbullying thread is the one to know about before you take a younger or more sensitive child, less because it is graphic, it is not, and more because it is the part most likely to prompt a real question on the way home.
What it gets right
The film keeps returning to the one thing the research is least equivocal about: the experience a screen cannot replace is two children in the same room making something up. It calls this imaginative play and treats it as a whole dimension of childhood rather than a nice-to-have.
Then it does the harder thing. Online connection, in the film, becomes a bridge to real friendship rather than a replacement for it, and Lily is ultimately the reason Bonnie meets a child she never otherwise would have. The film lands on balance, not abstinence, and refuses the easy moral that the device is the problem. That is a more honest ending than most of the discourse manages, and it is where this newsletter keeps landing too.
What this means for you right now
Use the film as a conversation, not a lesson. Watch it together and ask what your child made of Lily. Did they think she was the baddie? Who was right, the toys or the tablet? You will learn more about how your child sees their own screen from five minutes of that than from a month of monitoring.
Watch the dad, too. If a child is told to put the tablet down by an adult who never looks up from theirs, the rule was never going to hold.
Then take the one practical thing the film and the evidence agree on: protect some real, in-person play on purpose, because the default now is that it stops happening without anyone deciding it should. That is not the same as banning the device. Toy Story 5 does not ban Lily, and it is the better film for it. The screen is something to manage, model and talk about, not an enemy to defeat.
The short version, made for forwarding, is in this week’s newsletter, next to what Roblox just changed for every under-16 account.
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