The stars of “Toy Story 5” talk the return of beloved characters as director Andrew Stanton contemplates his final Pixar movie.

After 30 years of Toy Story, Woody and Buzz face the tech age as a Pixar legend comes full circle

The stars of "Toy Story 5" talk the return of beloved characters as director Andrew Stanton contemplates his final Pixar movie.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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April 28, 2026 12:00 p.m. ET

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If you know the name Andrew Stanton and you're not in the animation business, he'll tell you himself: "I question your sanity."**** The filmmaker reasons, "Animation's so anonymous, and I'm on the second tier of all that stuff. So it's weird. It's humbling. It's nice."**** Stanton would be the last to call himself a Pixar legend, though many admirers and collaborators would describe his work at the studio as legendary — or, in the words of Tom Hanks, "masterpieces."

"He's been there from the beginning," Joan Cusack tells **. "You can't be more passionate about what you're doing than Andrew Stanton."

Thirty-six years ago, the second animator and ninth overall employee ever hired to work at the revered animation house in 1990 had a great deal of *buzz* around a certain animated feature. *Toy Story* (1995) — Pixar's flagship movie starring Hanks and Tim Allen as the voices of Woody and Buzz Lightyear — earned Stanton, one of its four screenwriters, his first of six career Oscar nominations and paved the way for two future wins.

Since then, Stanton has been a foundational member of the Pixar "Brain Trust," a small group of senior creatives who have a hand in shaping every movie from the studio — and especially, in Stanton's case, every *Toy Story*. He's done so while directing some of Pixar's biggest successes: *A Bug's Life* (1998), *Finding Nemo* (2003) and its sequel *Finding Dory* (2016), and *WALL-E* (2008).

Now in 2026, he's thinking about what could be the last Pixar movie he directs.

*Toy Story 5* (in theaters June 19) — which brings back the star-studded voice cast for a toys-versus-tech concept more than 30 years after this family film saga began — is the first film in the franchise directed by Stanton, which already feels significant to those "insane" enough to know of him. In early April, speaking to EW from "the ranch" (i.e., Skywalker Ranch) where he's mixing the movie, Stanton muses, "This is probably the last one I'm gonna do."

He will, of course, continue working at Pixar, where he holds the larger title of vice president of creative. But *Toy Story 5* possibly being the last Pixar movie he directs comes as news to his stars.

"I don't like that. Now you've depressed me," Allen comments on the matter behind the scenes of CinemaCon in Las Vegas earlier this month.

"I remember on the first [*Toy Story*], in the closing title crawl, they put 'production babies,'" Hanks adds. "It takes so long to make these things. Some people get married, have babies, and by the time the movie comes out, the babies are 3-and-a-half years old. So I can understand that it takes quite a bite out of somebody's… not life, time-wise, but also the creative energy that must go into keeping all of these things together."

'Toy Story 5' stars Tim Allen and Tom Hanks for .

Stanton isn't lacking in creative energy. While the speed talker acknowledges he's slowed down slightly in recent years, he says, "I still talk too fast. My brain goes faster."

When pressed further about this potential director retirement, Stanton recalls, "I really thought [*Finding*] *Dory* was it. So I've got a lot of egg on my face. I'm not saying never, but the math doesn't add up."

He cites his age and current priorities in life (he started at Pixar at 24, and he's now 60) while emphasizing the years it takes to make just one animated movie to Pixar's standards. The time commitment, he argues, is the equivalent of earning a college degree.

"Four years goes so much faster the older you get, and I want my four years to last so long," he explains. "I don't wanna blink one more movie and be close to 70. So for me, personally, it's just about my desire to milk the most out of a day and out of a week and out of a month. I need to go back to real time instead of what I call 'rock time,' where the rock's still there, and the cities rise and fall, forests cut down and rise up. You're on rock time when you work in animation. I've been on rock time for most of my career."

Welcome to our tech talk

Bullseye and Jessie ride an actual horse in 'Toy Story 5'.

Before he knew he wanted to direct *Toy Story 5*, Stanton maintained strong opinions about where the series should go next, given his connection to the films. It was around the summer of 2022 when he began drafting a new tale that kicked off with a five-minute opening sequence: 50 high-tech Buzz Lightyear action figures awaken from their plastic packaging on a deserted island after their shipping crate falls off a boat.

"I knew I wanted them to be there for a bigger reason," Stanton says, "but I didn't know why."

1:25 Tom Hanks and Tim Allen show off vocal exercises

Including the main Buzz, that means Allen voices 51 Buzzes in the movie.

"I thought, *Finally, I get more screen time than Woody*," the actor jokes.

Allen ad-libbed each of those Buzz variants in the voiceover booth, and at the time of this interview, he says he's "still fighting for" a few voice variations he provided of Buzzes "that don't like being part of this group."

Stanton describes what it was like watching Allen tackle them all in one session: "I thought, *Is this gonna drive him mad?*… He just, like a Robin Williams, was doing one guy talking to another, talking to another. He started having conversations with himself and just kept going."

"These are very structured creatures," Allen says. "All they wanna do is find Star Command."

Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) in 'Toy Story 5'.

From the Buzzes leaving the island on a makeshift raft, the crux of the film became about the impact of tech on a child's development, mingled with that moment in all our lives when we're told it's no longer cool to play with toys. Stanton credits his co-director, Kenna Harris, for finding that story "driver."

Having worked on *Inside Out* spinoff series *Dream Productions*, as well as *Luca* and its *Ciao Alberto* short film, *Elemental*, and *Hoppers* for Pixar, Harris "brought to light the idea of friendship and the socialization aspect that connects both the modern devices and what toys are trying to do," Stanton notes.

After that Buzzy opening,* Toy Story 5* operates mainly as a Jessie movie. Cusack returns to voice the cowgirl for a 16th time (counting shorts and video games) alongside John Ratzenberg as piggybank Hamm; Wallace Shawn as dino Rex; Blake Clark as Slinky Dog; Jeff Bergman and Anna Vocino as Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head; Bonnie Hunt as rag doll Dolly; John Hopkins as hedgehog plushie Mr. Pricklepants; Kristen Schaal as Trixie the Triceratops ; Ernie Hudson as Combat Carl; Tony Hale as Forky; and Melissa Villaseñor as Forky's plastic-knife girlfriend, Karen Beverly.

Cusack's heart swells with pride and she chokes up when thinking back to her first reaction reading the script.

"I know every parent in the United States worries about their kids. When do you get them involved in tech? What does that do to their brains?" she says. "And that's what this movie's about. It's about humanity and playing and loyalty — and it makes me cry."

Bonnie is the last kid on her block still playing with toys, and she's struggling to make friends. Her parents think they found the solution: Lilypad (Greta Lee), a smart device introduced to help her connect with other kids her age in a virtual playground instead of a physical one.

Bullseye and Jessie face Lilypad in 'Toy Story 5'.

Lee, acknowledging she's essentially playing an iPad, seized the opportunity to "channel a lot of our own fears and concerns" about our collective tech dependency.

"Playing her was extremely cathartic," she says. "She's this thing that has held so much power within my house and has been a very complicated source of consideration."

Jessie and the gang naturally fear the worst. They've seen with just about every other kid in the neighborhood that once tech comes in, children become consumed by screens and no longer make time for toys. So she radios Woody, who's still liberating forgotten toys off in the distance with Bo Peep (Annie Potts) and Canadian daredevil Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves).

Woody, too, is going through some changes.

"He has been played with to excess," Hanks says, commenting on Woody's bald spot, caused by general wear and tear. "You put a rubber hat on top of a rubber head again and again and again and again, something's gonna chafe. So, yeah, he does have… let's say a *worn* area on the back of his head."

Then there's the gut, at which the actor chuckles. "He is not shaped plastic," Hanks continues. "He is made of stuffing and cloth, and that stuff settles over time."

As Woody makes his way back home, Jessie inadvertently makes her way out. With Bullseye in tow, her plan to help Bonnie make friends away from screens goes awry, and the cowgirl finds herself sent back to the house where Emily — Jessie's first child, who abandoned her years ago — once lived.

Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) in 'Toy Story 5'.

The farmland is now home to Blaze, "a spunky, funky, equestrian horse girl," says Mykal-Michelle Harris, who voices the new character. "She was raised on a ranch with her family, and she's never afraid to be herself. She's an older kid, but she's not afraid to play with toys or to have a whole bunch of horse figurines. That's kind of her thing."

Blaze has an actual horse named Daffodil and a bumbling pig named Jimmy Dean, but her other abandoned play pals are more tech than toy — and far less advanced than the Lilypads of the world.

Smarty Pants (Conan O'Brien) is an old potty-training gadget with only two buttons (No. 1 and No. 2). Like his comrades — a dated GPS tracker in the shape of a hippo head named Atlas (Craig Robinson) and a child-friendly digital camera named Snappy (Shelby Rabara) — he's been powered off for quite some time.

Jessie, Smarty Pants, Atlas, and Snappy in 'Toy Story 5'.

Robinson saw Atlas as "jolly" and "happy to be alive" once he’s powered back up.

"The closest thing to that I had was a View Master," he says of the 1939 stereoscopic gadget that's now making a nostalgic comeback. "It was very low-tech, if any tech at all… You thought you were forgotten about, and now, all of a sudden, you got a new lease on life."

Hearing that Smarty Pants is the scene-stealer in *Toy Story 5*, O'Brien retorts, "Maybe you've been drinking" — though that happens to be Stanton's inspiration for the character. He saw the setting of Blaze's ranch as an opportunity to play out a Western, with Jessie as the cowgirl and Smarty Pants as the village drunk. Rather than appearing sleepy when his battery is low, the tech stumbles and slurs his words.

"My character is proud and, like all my favorite comedy characters, fighting for status," the podcast host and longtime comedian says. "He's essentially a toilet-training robot, and he wants to be taken seriously. If anyone's not valuing his artistry or his work, he's upset about it. And that's just inherently funny."

30 years of Toy Story

Tim Allen and Tom Hanks for .

O’Brien doesn’t have some profound storybook experience of watching *Toy Story* for the first time, but his Team Coco assistant, David Hopping, who grew up on these movies, does. The comic remembers bringing Hopping to his recording sessions at Pixar HQ in the Bay Area.

"It's where they've recorded, I think, every single Pixar movie — certainly every *Toy Story* movie," O'Brien says. "It's pretty amazing to stand on that spot and think, *This is where Tom Hanks was standing when they did the first *Toy Story."

Lee was 13 when the 1995 original hit theaters.

"I have grown up with these characters," the actress says. "I cannot believe that I'm a part of this, and now I have my own kids, and I'm sharing this with them. I have no way of trying to understand it. It makes no sense to me."

Last year marked the 30th anniversary of *Toy Story*, and everyone's feeling nostalgic. Randy Newman's "You've Got a Friend in Me," the song he composed for the original and now permeates the fifth entry, fuels this feeling. It's difficult for Newman to identify the magic of that first film, including the music he created.

"It's only in writing movie songs do I get kinda close to doing something that millions might like," he says. "If I knew how I did it, I'd do it all the time, but I don't."

Allen came to Buzz after headlining TV sitcom *Home Improvement* and holiday comedy *The Santa Clause*, having "learned from some of the great voiceover talents" as a working comedian in Detroit. Hanks was fresh off *A League of Their Own*, *Sleepless in Seattle*, and the Oscar-winning *Philadelphia* when he first recorded Woody.

Smarty Pants, Atlas, Snappy, Bullseye, and Jessie in 'Toy Story 5'.

"Over the course of five movies, we've gone back to the same confines, and it's the same geometry," Hanks says. "The mic is here, the stand is there, the team is there. They might have some props or what have you, but if you could have taken me at any point in all of the recording of all of these, I experienced the same anxiety, pressure, physical demands of it. So there actually is a familiar sameness."

Stanton owes "everything in my career to the first movie and the skills that I've learned," the director acknowledges. But the older he's gotten, the more he's realized "nobody's flying the plane" — meaning, nobody had a great master plan for where these stories would go. But after hundreds of millions at the box office, people were still connecting with Woody, Buzz, and the gang.

"There's a way of looking at *Toy Story* [as it] was made out of a business decision: How do we make a movie that's all computer graphics?" Stanton says. "How do we marry it with an idea that you'd wanna see regardless? That's the show business of it all. We just want to make sure that the show is the driver of the show business."

It happened with *Toy Story 3* (2010) when someone in the room asked: What if Andy, the franchise's original child, went off to college?

"Everybody laughed," Stanton recalls. "And then there was a long pause, and we said, 'No, seriously. What if we did that?' What broke my brain was that we can embrace time. Other stories don’t have that luxury."

Smarty Pants (Conan O'Brien) in 'Toy Story 5'.

It came again with* Toy Story 4*. Stanton was brought in to consult at a time, he says, when the creatives were falling victim to "spectaculitis" (i.e., wanting to make a spectacle). He pitched a redo of the opener: "Let's have something really simple that shocks the perspective of the audience member to go, 'If I were a toy, that would be tragic.'" From that came the nine-year flashback to when Andy left a toy behind outside in the rain.

"Any other movie, that's boring, but [for] that movie, that's high stakes," he says.

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The idea for *Toy Story 5* was similar. Hanks thought 4 was "the actual perfect place to end the saga," but Stanton's approach felt like "vintage *Toy Story* without having to reboot toys," the actor says.

Stanton feels that, with just two months of brainstorming the mundane elements of the lifecycle of a toy, there would be two movies' worth of *Toy Story* material to explore next. Maybe not with Bonnie, but a different character as a focal point.

"That's why I feel like it can keep going," he says, even if it's not with him at the helm.

Stanton foresees he'll, at the very least, be asked to advise on Pixar films until he's "in a rocking chair somewhere. And I will always have a strong opinion about this." To him, "This is probably the best way I can leave my stamp at Pixar — teaching others how this is done."

- Animated Movies

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Source: “EW Animated”