1995
It started with jealousy.
A boy named Andy got a shiny new space ranger for his birthday. The old cowboy who thought he was the favorite learned the first hard lesson of love: you can be replaced.
For thirty-one years and four films, these toys grew up right alongside you. Before the fifth arrives, one last walk back.
A boy named Andy got a shiny new space ranger for his birthday. The old cowboy who thought he was the favorite learned the first hard lesson of love: you can be replaced.
A yodeling cowgirl named Jessie remembered a girl named Emily, who loved her completely, then grew up and gave her away. Many still call it the saddest two minutes Pixar has ever made.
Andy was grown and leaving for college. He gave his toys to a little girl named Bonnie, knelt down on the lawn, and played with them one last time.
For three films a toy's whole purpose was one child. In the fourth, Woody found Bo Peep again and chose a life of his own. This time the goodbye was his to make.
Each Toy Story earned more than the one before it. The kids who saw the first in 1995 kept coming back. Then they started bringing kids of their own.
Worldwide box office. Source: Box Office Mojo.
In Toy Story 5, the toys lose to Lilypad, an AI tablet. That part isn't make-believe. This is the share of children eight and under with their own tablet. In six years it went from almost none to nearly half.
Source: Common Sense Media Census.
"When tech comes in, it wins. It happens to adults and kids. It just wins."
Andrew Stanton, director of Toy Story 5.
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The toys have outlived the people who gave them their voices. Every new film is also a quiet goodbye to them.
When you hear those toys speak in the fifth film, you're hearing someone new, holding a voice in trust.
Randy Newman has scored every Toy Story since 1995. For the fifth, the new song belongs to Taylor Swift, written from Jessie's side of the story.
In 1998 someone at Pixar ran a delete command on the servers and Toy Story 2 began erasing itself, character by character. It survived only because one supervisor had a backup at home.
The license plate RM RF 97 in Toy Story 4 nods to that deletion command, the one that almost wiped the second film off Pixar's servers.
The code A113, the CalArts classroom where Pixar's animators studied, is hidden in every Pixar film. In Toy Story it's the plate on Andy's mom's car.
The hallway carpet in the cruel neighbor's house is the same hexagon pattern as the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's The Shining. Sid was always the horror movie.
Every toy that made you laugh, worry and cry.
Toy Story 5 opens June 19. Woody roams free now, so Jessie leads the room with Buzz at her side. And Bonnie has found a new favorite thing.
Its name is Lilypad, a frog-shaped tablet. For the first time, the toys aren't fighting another toy. They're fighting a screen.
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