In Toy Story 5, the toys' new rival is a tablet named Lily
Tom Hanks called Toy Story 4 the last one in 2019. Seven years later Pixar spent a reported 250 million dollars on a fifth film in which Jessie leads the toys against a frog-shaped tablet that has hooked eight-year-old Bonnie. It grossed 1.146 billion dollars, the franchise's biggest haul.
The premise swaps a rival toy for a screen. Bonnie's parents give her Lilypad, a frog-themed tablet voiced by Greta Lee, hoping it will help her make friends her own age. Instead she stops playing with her toys. Jessie, now Bonnie's favourite and leader of the toy box, calls Woody on a walkie-talkie, and he returns from rehoming abandoned toys with Bo Peep. A subplot follows 50 high-tech Buzz Lightyear units, voiced by Tim Allen, stranded on an island in demo mode and convinced they must find Star Command.
Getting there took a change of mind. Producer Mark Nielsen said in May 2019 that Pixar would focus on originals, though he refused to rule out another sequel. Bob Iger confirmed development in February 2023. It became the first mainline Toy Story made without co-creator John Lasseter, who left Pixar in late 2018. Andrew Stanton, a writer on all four earlier films, was named director, with Kenna Harris as co-director, and Randy Newman returned for his tenth Pixar score.
The film also served as a technology showcase. It was the first feature rendered with RenderMan XPU, which runs on CPUs and GPUs together and gave artists interactive full-frame renders about nine times faster. A horse called Daffodil took over a year to build; Pixar brought a real horse onto campus and devised invertible rigging, letting animators push or pull any control on a character. Bonnie's make-believe scenes are painted in a looser style to signal imagination, and animators consulted Black colleagues so that Blaze's hair behaved authentically.
Released in the United States on June 19, 2026, after a Los Angeles premiere on June 9, it posted Pixar's biggest worldwide opening weekend and became the tenth highest-grossing animated film. Critics praised the visuals and humour, though some faulted the script.
Source: Toy Story 5
