It’s long been said that Pixar movies — the good ones, at least — are as made for parents as they are for their kids, but that bit of received wisdom has always been especially true of the “Toy Story” franchise, for the basic reason that those films are about the parents, and to an even greater degree than “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” More specifically, they’re about the bittersweet sorrow of parenting, which the best of them articulate with a bluntness absent from so much “adult” fiction on the subject. Sure, Andy’s mom was an incidental figure, and his dad simply didn’t exist, but the attachment and responsibility that Buzz and Woody feel towards their children is impossible to mistake. The same goes for the toys’ inevitable heartbreak, best articulated by the crushing pangs of nostalgia that ginger rag doll Jessie suffers whenever she thinks about the precious little girl who first outgrew her. If this series and its deathless plastic heroes cling to friendship as their prevailing theme, that’s only because it, like them, can last forever without changing. It’s because friendship is the only form of love that’s liable to stay right where you played with it last. The genius of Andrew Stanton’s “Toy Story 5,” which for all its flaws proves sharper than any of these movies have been since the late ’90s, is that it recognizes how tech poses an unprecedented danger to the nature of play itself — how it threatens to make kids grow up even faster than they already did, while also gamifying the act of friendship into something that requires constant screen time in order to survive. That starts with the film’s backboard-shatteringly obvious slam-dunk of a premise, which credibly feels like it inspired the idea to make another sequel rather than the other way around: Bonnie gets an iPad. (“Extinction! Not again!,” Rex the dinosaur bemoans). ~this review continues on IndieWire~
