[COLUMN] Toy Story 5 Is a Two-Hour iPad Commercial | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Toy Story 5. If you’re looking for a quick review: I did not care for it. Time to put the toys away.

“The age of toys is over!” echo various characters through Andrew Stanton’s Toy Story 5, an existential threat to the protagonists of Pixar’s primary franchise. However, there is a corollary to that warning. The age of toys might be over, but tech is coming.

Early in Toy Story 5, the cowboy doll Jessie (Joan Cusack) discovers that kids these days are no longer playing with toys, but are instead engaging with technology. They are spending time staring at phone screens, tablets and even laptops. One of the big inciting incidents for the plot is Jessie’s owner Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) receiving her first tablet, the Lilypad (Greta Lee). Inevitably, Jessie and the toys are thrown into conflict with the Lilypad, vying for Bonnie’s attention.

As much as Toy Story 5 is a movie that really does not need to exist, this is a fairly decent hook for the series. After all, one of the bigger issues concerning children over the past couple of years is the shift away from physical play and tangible objects into the digital realm. A recent study suggested that the median age for children getting their first smartphone is 11. However, even children under 2 spend an average of more than an hour each day looking at a screen.

What research into this exists suggests that this is a real problem. Studies suggest that the amount of time that children spend on smart devices can negatively impact their attention spans and leads to “a rise in the likelihood of obesity, sleep disorders, and mental health conditions including depression and anxiety.” This is to say nothing of the technology’s addictive properties, particularly for children, something that the people running the companies designing the apps have been long aware of.

These side effects are widely discussed within newspapers and magazines online, and there is a sense that some parents are aware of the risks. Inevitably, this has become a class issue. While public schools have been encouraging middle- and working-class children to use smart devices, upper-class schools have tended to ban them. Poorer children are likely to spend up to two hours a day longer on screens than their wealthier counterparts. So there is an awareness of the issue, but among the rich.

So, setting aside the grim “cultural fracking” of making another sequel to Toy Story after both Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4 worked very hard to give the series a definitive ending, there is at least a possible justification for making another Toy Story film. After all, a billion-dollar family-friendly movie that directly acknowledges the dangers of this technology might serve an important cultural function in terms of raising awareness of the issues among the wider population.

Cinema is a populist medium. Since its very beginnings, cinema has been accessible to the masses. The reason that cinemas serve popcorn is because they needed a snack that could be produced and sold at low prices and in large quantities, even during the Great Depression. So a Disney franchise film aimed at children tackling the very real dangers that this poses to them would be a film that was worth making.

After all, there are attempts to legislate and regulate the industry. Mark Zuckerberg was recently grilled on the stand in a landmark court case of social media’s impact on the mental health of teenagers. Countries around the world, from Europe to Australia, are looking at serious regulating social media usage by children. This is a big deal. This is a hot button issue. And a Toy Story sequel that will likely be one of the biggest hits of the year has the potential to move the dial.

After all, there is a long history of these sorts of films changing public opinion. Top Gun doubled navy recruitment overnight. Super Size Me led McDonald’s to change their menu. Films like Okja have inspired people to become vegetarians. In the United Kingdom, Ken Loach’s television play Up the Junction is largely credited with shifting British attitudes on abortion and his Cathy Come Home is often cited as a turning point on public attitudes to homelessness.

It might be naïve to believe that film and television still have that sort of social power. This is in large part what Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is about. However, even in recent years both Mr. Bates vs The Post Office and Adolescence led to actual meaningful legislative and social change. And while Disney are notoriously antsy about wading into heavily polarized political issues, it is worth acknowledging that public mistrust of tech companies is a rare bipartisan issue.

However, Toy Story 5 fumbles the ball. Jessie is immediately suspicious of Lilypad, who makes casual ominous jokes like “I’m always listening.” Lilypad puts Bonnie in contact with a number of other girls from her dance class, and those girls proceed to cyberbully Bonnie. The opening act of the movie makes a pretty compelling case for Jessie’s scepticism about Lilypad. However, then the rest of the movie happens, and Jessie has to learn a very important lesson about how tech is good, actually.

Through a series of misadventures, Jessie ends up back at the home once owned by her original owner, Emily. Emily has long since moved on, but the house is now home to a child named Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris). Jessie tries frantically to get back to Bonnie, but in doing so winds up teaming up with a bunch of tech toys, including potty trainer Smarty Pants (Conan O'Brien), camera Snappy (Shelby Rabara) and GPS tool Atlas (Craig Robinson).

On this journey, Jessie learns that these toys are just like any other toy. They just want what is best for their kid. They also know how it feels to be discarded and cast aside. In one of the movie’s more insidious twists, Lilypad eventually realizes the emotional harm that she has caused to Bonnie and tries to throw herself away, only for Jessie to lead a rescue mission to recover Lilypad and restore the smart device to its rightful place: always listening at Bonnie’s bedside.

In broad terms, this is in keeping with the general structure of a Toy Story movie. The original Toy Story, after all, is about Woody (Tom Hanks) coming to terms with the possibility that he has been replaced by the newer action figure Buzz (Tim Allen), only to come to terms with the new status quo. So, at a certain distance, the relationship between Jessie and Lilypad is a little like that, and the structure of the film has a similar enough arc. Jessie has a similar journey to Woody.

Of course, there is a sense that Toy Story 5 is being a little disingenuous in this comparison. Buzz was another action figure. Buzz didn’t lead to Andy (John Morris) getting mercilessly bullied and sinking into a depression where he became a shell of himself. Buzz didn’t manipulate technology to get Woody sent into the garage so that he could monopolize his time with Andy, as Lilypad does with the other toys here. More fundamentally, though, tablets are just a fundamentally different thing.

Still, as bleak and disappointing as this might be, it is not necessarily surprising. “We're a technology company, so we're not sitting here going, ‘Oh no, how dare you -- tech?’” explained producer Lindsey Collins in press for the film. Pixar is very much a tech company. It was bought by Steve Jobs, who functioned as its CEO. The company still has a Steve Jobs building on its Emeryville Campus, based in the “weird” town between Oakland and Berkley, near Silicon Valley.

Toy Story 5, specifically, was developed by former Pixar “brain trust” member Andrew Stanton, who also directed Finding Nemo and Wall-E. There is a distinct techno-optimistic bent to Stanton’s output. Wall-E is, after all, the story of the adorable eponymous trash robot who ends up saving humanity. Stanton cites movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek: The Motion Picture among his favorite films, and that shines through in the choices that he makes.

One can sense Stanton’s techno-optimism in his other film released this year, In the Blink of an Eye, a multi-millennial science-fiction epic that went straight to Hulu. In the Blink of an Eye is a very bad film for a variety of reasons, but it is also a film that feels very out of step with the current moment. It is a movie that is not only extremely pro-artificial intelligence and pro-technology, but also very overtly pro-tech-company.

One of the film’s three timelines follows the love affair between Claire (Rashida Jones) and Greg (Daveed Diggs), which turns out to be important because they have a child. That child grows up to be David Greene (Luc Roderique), who founds the tech company Elixir. Elixir figures out a way to prolong human life almost indefinitely and seemingly develops space flight and artificial intelligence that allows humanity to continue on and survive past the end of the world.

In the Blink of an Eye elides the role that gigantic tech companies like Elixir might have played in helping destroy the world – the film implies that helping billions of people live forever was not ultimately a great call, but never dwells on it. Instead, another of the three threads of In the Blink of an Eye follows astronaut Coakley (Kate McKinnon) leading a mission to ferry what remains of mankind to a distant planet, with only the artificial intelligence Rosco (Rhona Rees) for company.

Ultimately, after a disaster on board, Rosco sacrifices herself to help Coakley continue on, offering a stirring and heartwarming defense of the human spirit. Rosco’s sacrifice is so great and so magnanimous that it becomes almost religious. Coakley salutes “thank you, Rosco” every time she enters the botanic bay constructed in Rosco’s old computer core. In the universe as imagined by In the Blink of an Eye, it is the tech companies and their products that will ultimately redeem humanity.

So, with that in mind, it’s no surprise that Toy Story 5 lacks the resolve to candidly acknowledge the danger that these sorts of companies and their products pose to children. In the end, Lilypad is saved and redeemed. She becomes an essential part of the family. Kids can even buy a cute Lilypad case for their iPads, because that sort of corporate synergy was never going to slip past Disney. It is as bleak and depressing as it is unavoidable.

Then again, it’s hard to imagine that it could have gone any other way. After all, Pixar is not a shingle of a gigantic multimedia conglomerate that sees it in large part as an assembly line designed to produce content to be consumed by children on devices like the Lilypad. Of course Toy Story 5 was going to reassure children and parents that technology is inevitable. That is the trick of the modern tech boom, convincing audiences they have no choice in the matter and can only hope it works out.

This is the true subtext of Toy Story 5, with Lilypad showing up to frog-march audiences into the future.