Despite my exhaustion over Disney’s seemingly unending release of remakes and sequels, my childhood love for the Toy Story franchise was enough to get me into the cinema doors for its newest instalment. The film was a nostalgic and heartfelt return to some of my favourite characters and focused on the importance of friendship in a digital age. 

The film follows the toys as they try to help Bonnie, their new owner as of the third movie, make friends. Unlike previous Toy Story instalments, the film focuses less on Woody and more on Jessie, who by a seemingly random set of events finds herself back at the home of her first child. The movie finally provides the closure I needed over one of the series most devastating scenes (when Jessie is first abandoned by her owner in Toy Story 2).

While the Toy Story franchise is a children’s series, it attempts to appeal to themes and ideas relevant to all ages. This includes tackling the role of technology and the influence of social media on the development of young children. The primary antagonist is Lilypad, a tablet that Bonnie’s parents feel pressured to buy her to help her make friends and keep up with her peers. Lilypad connects her with girls who mock her for her wild imagination and love of toys, leaving Bonnie more distraught and isolated than ever.

Interestingly, her parents never seem to be monitoring Bonnie’s use of Lilypad. Further attention to her use of the device might have been a simpler solution to the issues it raised. While this may have been a less interesting conclusion, it could also have been a more nuanced and realistic take on the issue.

Instead, Bonnie’s parents remain mostly oblivious to her struggle, and a convoluted plot is hatched by the toys to connect Bonnie with a girl they deem worthy of being her friend. The plot relies on the remorse of Lilypad, which weakened the movie’s cautionary stance on technology, sending a somewhat mixed message that devices truly do intend to help their owner. Overall, I found the film had little to say on such a heavily debated topic aside from bringing these ideas to a younger audience.

The most interesting point the movie raises is the inherent temporality of new technologies, exemplified when Jessie meets some early digital toys who all spent under a year with their child before being abandoned. While Jessie and Woody are rag dolls from a bygone era that have each had multiple owners and are still beloved toys, the more complicated, high-tech toys that Jessie meets are used far less before being discarded, having already passed their use by dates or superseded by newer technologies.

The movie itself is an example of this rapid innovation. Its production marks the rapid change in animated films’ visual capabilities since the series began in 1995. A nice touch is the change in style for Bonnie’s imagined play scenes, which look as though they have been painted together in pastels, helping to distinguish Bonnie’s world from the real one.

With all this in mind, the instalment included all the ridiculous fun one can expect from a Toy Story movie, with an action-packed Buzz Lightyear plotline involving a shipwrecked platoon of high-tech toys, Buzz and Woody’s typical fights and the toys’ deep care for their children.

Fundamentally, the movie’s focus was on friendship and change, which was a wholesome return to Toy Story’s core values. It was a film that was easy to emotionally connect with, as you can’t help but care for Bonnie and sympathise as she struggles to make friends and navigate the complications of the online world.