There is a moment in every great Toy Story film where it earns your emotions.

Woody watches Andy choose Buzz. Jessie remembers Emily. The toys accept what they believe are their final moments together. Woody realises his purpose no longer belongs with Bonnie. Pixar never demanded tears. It patiently built towards them, trusting its audience to come willingly.

Toy Story 5 takes a different approach. It wants the emotional reward without doing the work required to earn it.

That is its greatest failing.

For a franchise built upon meaningful endings, Toy Story has become remarkably reluctant to let anything end. Toy Story 3 felt definitive. Toy Story 4 somehow justified reopening that story by giving Woody one final, deeply personal chapter. This latest instalment struggles to answer the most important question of all: why does it exist?

Instead, it leans heavily on nostalgia, assuming our affection for these characters will carry emotional moments that never quite develop naturally.

The biggest disappointment is that there are so few genuine stakes.

Earlier films balanced adventure with difficult choices and real consequences. Here, the central conflict feels surprisingly tame. Lilypad never evolves into a truly compelling antagonist. Unlike Lotso, whose cruelty was rooted in understandable heartbreak, she remains frustratingly one-dimensional, and when the conflict resolves itself, it does so with little sacrifice or consequence. The tension simply evaporates.

The film’s central message proves equally frustrating.

The conflict between traditional toys and modern technology feels painfully simplistic. Toys good. Tablets bad.

The reality is considerably more complicated than that. Children don’t benefit from rejecting technology outright; they benefit from adults helping them understand when and how to use it. That’s a nuanced conversation. Toy Story 5 reduces it to a slogan.

Pixar has never been afraid of moral themes, but its finest films discovered those lessons through character. Here, the lesson often feels predetermined, leaving the story to trudge dutifully towards conclusions it hasn’t fully earned.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is Jessie.

The film repeatedly draws attention to Emily, inviting the audience to remember one of the franchise’s most heartbreaking stories. Every reminder feels like it’s building towards something meaningful, encouraging viewers to hold their breath in anticipation of an emotional reunion that never arrives. Whether that reunion was ever necessary is beside the point. The film itself creates the expectation before quietly abandoning it, leaving Jessie’s emotional journey feeling strangely incomplete.

Visually, there are flashes of the Pixar imagination that made this studio extraordinary. The ‘Play Mode’ aesthetic is genuinely inventive and briefly injects the film with a sense of visual personality. Ironically, however, one of its most original ideas also feels strangely underdeveloped, another concept introduced before the film hurries towards its next emotional destination.

That urgency becomes increasingly noticeable.

Toy Story 5 wants us to feel before it has given us enough reason to care.

There are undeniably touching moments scattered throughout, and there remains something quietly comforting about seeing these characters reunited once again. The problem is that comfort and emotion are not the same thing. The film mistakes emotional familiarity for emotional investment, expecting thirty years of goodwill to bridge storytelling gaps that previous films would never have accepted.

Watching Toy Story 5, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Pixar had returned to a story it had already finished telling. Whether that impression reflects reality behind the scenes is impossible to know, but it is the feeling the finished film leaves behind. The curiosity, confidence and emotional precision that once defined the studio seem noticeably absent.

Perhaps the most telling moment came not on screen, but in the cinema itself.

When the credits rolled, there was silence.

Not the reflective silence that follows something profound, but the quiet murmur of an audience with very little to say. Even the post-credit scene was met with little more than a collective roll of the eyes.

That reaction felt strangely fitting.

Toy Story 5 isn’t a terrible film. It isn’t cynical, and it certainly isn’t devoid of heart. Yet heart alone has never been enough for Pixar. This was the studio that famously scrapped early versions of the original Toy Story because it recognised the characters weren’t working. It built its reputation by refusing to settle for sentimentality when it could achieve genuine emotion.

This time, it settles.

There are moments of warmth. There are moments of charm. There are even moments that almost recapture the magic that made Toy Story one of cinema’s greatest animated franchises.

Almost.

In the end, Toy Story 5 doesn’t shine on its own merit. It simply reflects the brilliance of the films that came before it, asking us to revisit emotions it never quite earns.

Perhaps the hardest goodbye was never Andy’s.

It was ours.