FILM · 2026 · USA
Toy Story 5
- Directed by
- Andrew Stanton
- Runtime
- 102 min
- Studio
- Pixar
30 archived facts 4 topics 4 sources Last reviewed Nov 2026
When Bonnie receives a Lilypad tablet as a gift and becomes obsessed, Buzz, Woody, Jessie and the rest of the gang's jobs become exponentially harder when they have to go head to head with the all-new threat to playtime.
30 Interesting Facts About Toy Story 5
Interesting Facts (20)
- #001
Besides Buzz Lightyear, Tim Allen also voices Multi-Buzz, a set of 50 high-tech Buzz units stuck in demo mode.
- #002
This film is the first time we hear Jessie's pull-string voice line.
- #003
As all the Buzz Lightyears ride their horses, a Pizza Planet truck can be seen driving down the road.
- #004
When Lilypad pulls up a picture of the ocean on her screen, it's a still from Finding Nemo (2003).
- #005
Visual effects supervisor Thomas Jordan said no artificial intelligence was used in making the film: "We're learning about it and we've done experiments with it, but so far nothing can meet our standards or expectations for the quality of our films."
- #006
When they reach a campsite, one of the Multi-Buzzes notices two children listening to their mother read The Velveteen Rabbit, another story about a toy that longs to be "real."
- #007
Combat Carl is among the toys forgotten by Blaze, the new girl living in Emily's old house. A Combat Carl first appeared in the original Toy Story (1995) before Sid Phillips blew him up, and another showed up in the 2013 short Toy Story of Terror! (2013) and in Toy Story 4 (2019), voiced by the late Carl Weathers. In Toy Story 5, Combat Carl is voiced by Ernie Hudson.
- #008
When the security guard comes toward the Buzz toys on the loading dock, they all freeze, then wonder why they did it. That finally answers a point fans of the original Toy Story (1995) had raised: Buzz, who thinks he's a real Space Ranger and not a toy, still freezes around humans like every other toy. The film suggests all toys instinctively hide that they're alive from humans and animals, even if they don't know they're toys.
- #009
One of the cleverest gags is that the toys can't work Lily's touchscreen. Touchscreens respond to a small electrical current that only a conductive material like a finger or a stylus can carry; the toys' plastic hands don't conduct, so they use Sammy's lizard claw instead.
- #010
Looking up Jessie, Lilypad opens the eBid site (an eBay parody) and shows a picture of her taken in the holiday short Toy Story of Terror! (2013), in which Jessie is snatched by a toy dealer.
- #011
Atlas made a cameo in Mabel's bedroom in Hoppers (2026), as a teaser for Pixar Animation Studios' next film, Toy Story 5.
- #012
In the second film, Bullseye was going to talk, voiced by Martin Short, who was officially cast before the character was made silent. Here Bullseye does finally get to speak, if only in the playtime sequence with Blaze, voiced by Alan Cumming.
- #013
The film puts to rest one of the series' most popular fan theories, that Jessie's owner Emily grew up to be Andy's mother: we see a photo of the grown-up Emily, and she looks nothing like Andy's mother or her daughter.
- #014
The first Toy Story film without a song sung by Randy Newman, though he still wrote the score, and a few notes of "You've Got a Friend in Me" flash briefly across Lilypad's screen.
- #015
In Forky's imaginary wedding scene, after Rex is "poisoned," he turns the colors of Sully's fur (from Monsters, Inc.).
- #016
After finding Emily's daughter's hair clip in the time capsule, Jessie can be seen wearing it.
- #017
Building, rigging and simulating the horse character took more than a year. Pixar Animation Studios brought a real horse onto its campus for the animators to study and developed a new technique called "invertible rigging." Pixar CTO Steve May explained: "It allows for direct control, inverse and forward kinematics, using every control on the character. You can bend or pull a finger, move the hand, then adjust the elbow and shoulder at the same time, calculate how the feet contact the ground and let the ankles roll. Riggers no longer have to create custom controls for a unique performance."
- #018
The subplot about the defective Buzz Lightyear figures comes from Circle 7's original script for Toy Story 3 (2010).
- #019
Tim Allen was so unhappy with the ending of Toy Story 4 (2019) that he suggested changing it to show that Woody's goodbye to the gang wasn't for good, but the idea was turned down to keep the status quo. This film reveals that the toys have been able to talk to Woody by radio since he left, so the farewell at the end of 4 is no longer final.
- #020
Jessie was originally going to be reunited with an elderly Emily, who would introduce her to her granddaughter and tell her how much she had loved her as a child. The writers decided to keep Jessie's choice more open, so instead she finds a makeshift time capsule left by Emily's daughter, who was named "Jessie" in honor of the doll her mother loved as a girl.
Behind the Scenes (6)
- #021
Toy Story 5 was the first feature rendered with Pixar's new RenderMan XPU software, which can run on CPUs and GPUs at once and gave artists interactive, full-frame rendering nine times faster.
- #022
Toy Story 5 made wider use of Luna, an extension to Pixar's core 3D animation system Presto that lets lighting artists work on several shots at once, so moving the sun in one shot instantly updates a whole grid of shots.
- #023
According to Pixar CTO Steve May, invertible rigging allows direct manipulation and inverse and forward kinematics with every control on a character, so riggers no longer need to build unique controls for special moves.
- #024
Visual effects supervisor Thomas Jordan said the hair system built for Blaze will allow for more diversity in future Pixar films.
- #025
Co-director Kenna Harris said the animators consulted Black colleagues to make Blaze's hair look and move authentically from scene to scene.
- #026
Taylor Swift wrote and produced her Toy Story 5 song and played it for Disney CEO Bob Iger and Walt Disney Music president Tom MacDougall just hours after seeing an advance screening.
Characters & Cast (1)
- #027
Tom Hanks said Tim Allen, the voice of Buzz Lightyear, had warned him about how emotional Woody and Buzz's final goodbye in Toy Story 4 would be.
Deeper Meaning (3)
- #028
The story casts Jessie in a role much like Woody's in Toy Story (1995), with Lilypad as the new Buzz Lightyear: a high-tech toy given to a child that quickly steals the spotlight in her room. The parallel is underlined by Jessie's first encounter with Lilypad on Bonnie's bed, mirroring Woody meeting Buzz in Andy's room, and like Woody and Buzz, the two start out as rivals but come to understand each other and end up friends.
- #029
Smarty Pants was designed to help with potty training: a roll of toilet paper inspired her look, and potty-training icons appear on her digital screen. Production designer Bob Pauley explained that Smarty Pants, along with Snappy (an old digital camera) and Atlas (a hippo-shaped geocaching toy), is an older device. "If Smarty Pants existed, Blaze could have gotten that potty training device when she was two or three years old, and it could have been made five or eight years ago," he said. "We wanted to add a bit of nostalgia to it, so it's not competitive in terms of a tablet. It has a low-resolution LCD screen like Snappy." After the voices were recorded, Pauley and the animators tweaked the designs to fit them; Smarty Pants' yellow handle is a nod to the hair color of Conan O'Brien, who voices her.
- #030
Tom Hanks explained that Woody's bald spot comes from wear and tear from taking his hat on and off again and again. Toys don't age like people, but they show their years through signs of use, fitting the film's theme of modern devices making Woody look dated. Hanks noted that a Sharpie could fix it: "Mileage becomes a way of expressing age. This bald spot comes from wearing the hat so often that the material wears out. I think Woody aged because he was busy saving the day and solving problems. Fortunately, as long as he's sturdy, it's fine. A Sharpie in the right shade can hide a bald spot."
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- Wikipedia Toy Story 5 — Wikipedia
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