Disney have announced a fifth Toy Story – why not give it a chance? (Picture: Disney/Pixar)
You’ve heard the news: Disney has unveiled a batch of upcoming sequels. Frozen 3, a Zootopia follow-up, and, perhaps distressingly, a fifth Toy Story.
The collective millennial affection for the saga, which ostensibly concluded with the third instalment in 2010 when Andy left for college, was irreversibly crystallised when Woody (Tom Hanks) whispered ‘So long, partner’ to his old friend.
By the mid-2010s, when some of us entered our 20s, our unconditional devotion to the trilogy, an all-time great, ran so deep that we felt an innate urge to protect it.
Heart-warming, riotously funny, and poignant – it is ultimate family viewing and an emotional home. It contains core memories so precious and formative that we daren’t disturb them. We will share them with our children and our grandchildren until the day we’re no longer here.
It’s why I still hear the distant ringing of the panic alarms that set off in 2014 when Pixar announced Toy Story 4 (TS4).
Millennials are attached to the original trilogy like very little else (Picture: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock)
By then, Toy Story was a fragile, treasured, and, most importantly, closed book. To even touch the book again – let alone open it – risked seriously damaging it. The panic was widespread, too, and representative of how art is extra-textual, defined equally by what the audience absorbs and what the creator puts in.
Sure, every generation of cinema fandom must endure its merry-go-round of crappy sequels, but TS4 was an army of Emperor Zurgs come to blow up our precious little universe. The trilogy so perfectly mapped out its own trajectory in parallel with our own lives that any extension or addition felt like it could break something valuable.
But then, to mass celebration and surprise, TS4 was, in a word, magnificent. I left the cinema sobbing and immediately phoned my mum. ‘They’ve actually done it,’ I said. Five years of dread, erased in 100 minutes.
Will Woody and Buzz have an emotional reunion in the 5th film? (Picture: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock)
TS4 is a gorgeous, sensitive meditation on empty nest syndrome. Woody might have fewer responsibilities now Andy’s grown up, but he has less vigour and a hole where Andy once was.
Thanks to Bo Peep (Annie Potts), TS4 carefully tells a delicate tale about fulfilment in retirement, peacefully letting go of your youth, and knowing when your race is run.
Through Forky (Tony Hale), it explores the existential terror of simply being. The adorable spork’s journey, perfectly animated from start to finish, bravely posits that we’re born as jigsaws with missing pieces, and that finding those pieces is exactly what we’re alive to do.
I hold TS4 in such high esteem because it needed to work unbelievably hard to earn my goodwill and emphatically secured it. My favourite trilogy now had the perfect epilogue and I naively thought there was no need to return.
Woody and Buzz had said their goodbyes and accepted they may never see each other again. Okay, it felt like a definitive goodbye when Andy drove away from Woody in 2010. But this time, surely this time, it really was it.
But Toy Story 5 was announced earlier this week. When I saw the headline, I expected those 2014 panic alarms to return. But nothing stirred.
Even if I didn’t know it in 2019, my significant apprehension of TS4 was so thoroughly destroyed by the film that I was very slowly and gradually opened up to the possibility of even more. Or maybe I just did some growing up.
This isn’t a view I’ve held for long. I wrote extensively about why I was against a Jon Snow sequel to Game of Thrones just last year. But I wish I could retract it.
Who am I to tell Kit Harington what to do with a character he played for a decade? He took on the role as a boy and left it as a young man; he’ll return to Jon as a father of two children. His experiences will have informed the next chapter in Jon’s story.
Ultimately, the Toy Story quadrilogy teaches us that, while letting go of the physical is a difficult but essential part of the human experience, retaining the emotional makes everything worth it.
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Woody accepts that childhood ends, and that he can’t protect Andy forever, at the precise moment he realises the wonderful truth that Andy will never forget him.
Even if Toy Story 5 disappoints, the original trilogy, plus its wonderful addendum and our memories of all four films, are still there. No, we don’t need a fifth entry, but we didn’t need a fourth or third either, or a second for that matter.
But good stories can come from anywhere and Toy Story 5 may yet provide one.
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The first four have been golden family classics. Maybe the fifth film will be too.
