If you’re looking for a great movie to spark conversation with your kids, go see “Toy Story 5.” I watched it this past weekend with my 11-year-old, and it gave both of us lots to think about. I’ve been mulling it over ever since.
The plot revolves around a little girl named Bonnie who loves to play with her toys. She comes up with all sorts of wonderful imaginary games that entertain her for hours. When she meets other children her own age, she realizes that they don’t play the way she does; they all have tablets, and they tease her for playing with old-fashioned “real” toys. She feels embarrassed and left out.
In order to bridge this social divide, Bonnie’s parents buy her a Lilypad tablet to “connect” with friends. Instantly, she becomes consumed by it and stops playing with her old toys. The toys, which come to life as soon as the humans are out of sight, are alarmed and outraged; they embark on a mission to save Bonnie from Lilypad and to find her a true friend who appreciates imaginative, analog toys and games.
It’s a smart storyline that is relevant to the conversations and debates that many families are having nowadays. Some aspects of the movie are refreshingly on point, almost uncomfortably so; others seem to shy away from being as blunt as they could be. Overall, the messaging is accurate and helpful to families that might be struggling to convey to their children why screen-based play is inferior to real, in-person play.
Here are some points from the movie that stood out for me. These might be things to watch for or discuss among your own household. (Warning: There are some spoilers.)
1. The parents are shockingly negligent
It is infuriating to see how disengaged and oblivious Bonnie’s parents appear to be after giving her the Lilypad tablet. There is a brief mention of screen time limits when they first hand it to her, but then it doesn’t come up again. The parents themselves are often on their phones or on Zoom meetings, and Bonnie quickly starts to spend all her time on Lilypad. It is stored on a charger beside her bed and is the first thing she reaches for in the morning.
Bonnie’s personality and mood shift drastically as she spends more time online, but her parents barely seem to notice. When she comes home visibly distraught from a disastrous sleepover, they ask what’s the matter, but then oddly don’t push the issue. She retreats miserably into her bedroom, and only later do the toys find out that Bonnie’s friends played hide-and-seek and forgot to find her. Why a parent wouldn’t dig deeper, I don’t understand.
When Bonnie is cruelly mocked in a group chat and exhibits profound distress, crying and clutching her tablet in the backseat of the car, her mother asks permission to view the group chat before urging Bonnie to keep talking to her about everything that happens online! That choice of behaviour was extremely disturbing to me, as if some nebulous concept of “privacy” is more important than parenting and protecting one’s child (not that privacy even exists online in group chats, anyway). The situation clearly called for outrage on the part of the mother, and yet there was none.
It almost seems like the parents themselves are numb to the damage caused by the device, or willfully ignorant because it’s inconvenient to admit what’s really going on.
2. The presence of devices changes the nature of play
Play and entertainment are not the same thing. Tablets distract through passive consumption, while real play demands effort, focus, creativity, and imagination. Tablets appear to suck the energy out of a group of kids, who merely coexist in a space without actually engaging with each other. Of course, we see this all the time now, even to the point of hardly noticing it, but the movie does a good job of reminding us just how creepy it is to see children sitting beside each other and not playing. It’s profoundly unnatural.
There are some early-generation battery-operated digital toys that appear in the movie, too, and they talk about how their child-owner played with them for around two months each, before losing interest. The protagonist, an analog doll named Jessie, is astonished by this; she spent years playing with her child-owner. She tells them that two months is nothing—and she’s right. It’s a good reminder of just how quickly kids tend to lose interest in toys that have a single purpose, that cannot be reinterpreted and reimagined in new and interesting ways.
3. Followers are NOT the same as friends
Bonnie learns the hard way that just because someone “follows” you online or engages with you in a group chat does not mean that they are a real friend or even a good match for friendship. She learns, too, that people are more prone to nastiness online than they might be in person. They’ll pile on in mean ways, if that’s what everyone else is doing.
Unfortunately, there is little incentive to treat people with kindness online, because those relationships feel so transient and fragile; it’s easy to ghost someone, to rage-quit, to delete a profile if someone annoys you. There is no requirement to face the person you’ve hurt or offended, or to have the sorts of difficult conversations that lead to greater wisdom, connection, and emotional investment over time.
The movie offers a powerful reminder that we need to encourage and model in-person friendships with real, live, flesh-and-bone people, because it’s a totally different thing than a virtual connection.
4. The imaginary play sequences are delightful
Whenever Bonnie engages in real imaginative play, it is portrayed like a pastel-type animation that has a different quality from the rest of the film. The worlds she develops are hilarious, absurd, exaggerated, and heart-warming. They are also reminiscent of the type of play I engaged in with my little sister throughout our entire childhood—think make-believe weddings with characters draped in toilet paper wedding gowns.
As I sat in the dark theatre, I couldn’t help but think that all the other adults would recognize that type of play, and probably get the same warm fuzzy feeling I did from the memory of it, but how many children or teens would feel the same? How many young viewers would recognize that type of play for what it is, a deep flow state, a thrilling sensation in which you lose track of time and invent another world to inhabit temporarily?
Children have such a short window of time to lose themselves in such play; we should do everything in our power to protect that window and not let devices rob them of it. They have the rest of their adult lives to fret about unanswered texts and emails, but never enough time to play with their imaginations.
5. The tablet gets an undeserved redemption
In the end, the tablet throws herself into a donation bin because she can see how detrimental she’s been for Bonnie; but then she ends up getting rescued by the toys because she’s the only way to connect Bonnie with the one true friend who can play with her in the right analog fashion.
I didn’t like this. It felt contrived and disappointing, especially when so many of us parents want to emphasize the fact that there are alternative ways to communicate that do not have to rely on tablets or smartphones. For instance, the two kids knew where each other lived and had already visited once before. Why couldn’t they hop on a bike or ask a parent for a ride, do it the old-fashioned way? Instead, the tablet was positioned as the sole possible connector between the two.
The filmmakers said in an interview that many people did want to make Lilypad the villain: “Wouldn’t it be so great if we could just chuck her into a flaming pile of garbage, and all of our problems will be solved?” But they said it wasn’t that simple.
[It] didn’t feel like an honest reflection of the truth of our lives right now, which is that we are stuck with our devices, there’s not really a way around it, and they’re a very important part of kids’ lives right now. There can be consequences to too much tech, but they’re how kids connect with each other and with their learning and with games. It was the connection aspect that really unlocked the rest of the film for us.
I’ve never bought into the idea that we’re “stuck with our devices and there’s no way around it,” especially when it comes to children. We parents are the ones who make that choice for them. We should not allow it, just because everyone else is, and we owe our kids a fierce defence. We owe them years of blatant refusal, precisely for all the reasons that are so wonderfully illustrated in the film—that kids do not possess the ability to resist on their own. That’s asking too much of them. They need us, their parents and guardians, to draw a line and say no on their behalf.
Perhaps this redemption was added to the story to assuage the guilt of parents who want to believe that there is a time and place for young kids to be messaging each other via devices, and that those benefits of convenience outweigh the risks associated with exposing your child to the entire Internet. Lilypad did not deserve the redemption she got, even though—and this is a key point in all our tech use—the device itself is not inherently bad, but the things it enables for children are.
It’s great to see these tough conversations about kids and tech entering mainstream media and being presented in a discerning and even provocative way. Check out the movie—you won’t regret it!
Another thought: Lilypad is always out to "help" Bonnie. That is what she sees as her purpose, even when she does it in ways that the other toys disagree with. This is also why she attempts to donate herself (she comes to believe she's bad for Bonnie) before she becomes the hero.
Thing is, Jessie and the other old-fashioned toys have agency, but real toys don't. But Lilypad and her real-life counterparts both actually do have agency. And yet Lilypad's agency -- that she makes decisions based on trying to help Bonnie and what she believes is good for Bonnie -- is *very* different from how algorithms, AI bots, etc. behave in real life. Their agendas are market-driven.
So here we have a tablet that is portrayed as morally oriented toward Bonnie's good. But in real life, this sort of tech is market-driven, oriented toward making money.
If I were a kid, the message I would get is that the tablet has my best interests at heart.
Thanks. Once again you have given content worth forwarding to others.