Off-the-Record: Toy Story 5 Did NOT Make Mary Cry

0:02Happy Friday, Slatesters. This is the time when the show goes off the record just for you, our Slate Plus friends and neighbors and fans. We spend all week long getting answers from experts on the biggest stories out there. Sometimes we need answers to more pressing questions, though, more real world questions for our lives. Stuff like should I spend my holiday weekend actually going to see the new Toy Story movie. So my guest today for a movie club version of Off the Record is the incomparable Sam Adams. Hello, Sam. Hello, Mary. You get called incomparable nearly enough, so thank you. I'm here for you, 100%.

0:41I know you're going to have a ton of answers for me about this film and whether you loved it or hated it. Our colleague Dana Stevens called it the best Pixar sequel in years, which I'm going to talk to you about that. but I do want to remind our listeners before we really get into it that if they have questions for us things they want answers to they want to know about the show how it works they want to suggest something they can always write to us at whatnext at slate.com okay Sam can we just right away say I have seen the new Toy Story movie Toy Story 5 yeah uh do you agree with Dana's assessment that this is the best Pixar sequel in years.

1:24I realize it is sequel, not movie, not film. So there's like some wiggle room here. Please explain. Yeah, I think I would agree with that. I mean, that certainly includes like the previous two Toy Stories. I liked the previous two. I don't dislike them either. There was crying in the theater when I watched the previous two. The previous two are like um andy the owner of the toys goes to college that one came out in 2010 i had a two-year-old i believe in the theater i let out a whale like a kind of like trying to like suck back the tears that was audible to everyone around me so i liked that one i felt like i got something from it the next one was like more about the toys finding freedom kind of thing to live their lives fair yes yeah um and then this i mean this one is i think i'm with you on this one i mean this is somewhat my opinion as a professional film critic but probably more um my opinion as a middle-aged person with a teenager but like this this one just like wrecked me there i'm really glad that i saw like a critic screening with no one next to me because there was like ugly crying going on.

2:41It was a lot. This one did not wreck me. Let's lay out the premise of this film for people. I went with my entire family, my 18-year-old, my 12-year-old, my husband, and maybe it was the half hour of ads beforehand that really left me in a bad place to be emotionally touched by anything. But the plot is basically, you got these toys, they're living with a young girl bonnie this is like the girl who's inherited toys from andy um and bonnie is very very sweet but she gets what's called a lily pad which is a device and the whole premise is like is tech bad is tech replacing play kids don't play anymore because they just sit in front of their devices oh thank you thank you hi there i'm lily pad let's play extinction not again I have to say there was real darkness at the center of this movie to me in a way that there was not in previous versions maybe it's because I'm a parent and I feel this darkness of devices all the time but there were a number of sequences where you just were looking from home to home or person to person and you would see person after person children adults whoever with the blue light pouring onto their faces looking like zombies it was unhappy to me it's like a child's like animated version of that like chris ware new yorker cover they're like just looking at on the apartment that's true actually yeah yeah and um there were a couple reasons i feel like it didn't work for me i'll say but to me it was awkwardly plotted there were like three plots going on at once that had to like intersect and so like the movie started three times.

4:29And as soon as that happened, I was like, I'm not what. So that's like a technical concern. But let's talk about the idea here. The idea is these devices are taking over. Kids aren't playing. Is that why this hit for you? Like, what was it that hit for you? I want to understand. Yeah, it was not so much sort of the main subject. I mean, I think that was an interesting turn. And as someone who definitely did not feel after the second or the third or the fourth Toy Story, like there needed to be another one. That seemed like the inclusion of tech. Like good on them for finding another bite of the apple that you didn't think existed.

5:08That seemed like, okay, maybe there's something, there's a reason to do another one of these. Like it's not really something the series has dealt with. I think that's fair. And I was ready to kind of roll my eyes and think this is just going to be sort of like screenplay by Jonathan Haidt time. And it does come to a slightly more nuanced place than like just screens are bad. It does. That's kind of what I hated about it. Anyway, continue. But it does get into, you know, one of the things that's like hard to take as as a father of daughter. Yeah. Is that the reason the parents get there? I think she's eight in the movie.

5:44They get Bonnie this iPad lily pad is because she's I think they moved in the previous movie and she's like still having trouble with connecting with kids after a year. And this is like, OK, you can use this to like message with your friends in the dance class um and then it turns out that her little eight-year-old friends in the dance class are just like a bunch of bitches um and they're really mean to her and they're like cyber bullying her on this app and it's like especially horrifying because she's like the sweetest little pumpkin of a child like it's like she's drawn in this way she looks much younger than eight she looks about like three or four and you're like watching these dms come in from these girls in the dance class and you're like i hate them and they're mocking her for like still playing with toys which of course is like from an adult perspective i mean it's like no don't don't get rid of that bonnie like stay true to yourself um but i mean you know kids are no one is more eager to get out of childhood than a child um you know but like having you know having been through middle school with a female child like that part definitely um got to me on a number of levels.

6:56But I would say that was not really the part of the story that kind of stabbed me right in the heart. Okay. I still remember the feelings I had, the rather enormous emotions I had during the sort of montage in Toy Story 2 when we find out how Jessie the cowgirl got left behind by her kid. And they basically took those devastating two minutes of Sarah McLachlan montage and sort of made an entire movie out of it, which I was frankly a little frightened of and for good reason because. Jessie has returned to her previous home where like this girl lived and the girl's not there anymore but it's this kind of like it's it's if you've seen Toy Story 2 this is like oh interesting like we're going back to this place that as you said they really like milked my emotions about yes and I think they sort of I don't um I don't think this is explicit in Toy Story 2 but they do sort of like a smart thing in this which is um the current inhabitants of the house um like jesse sort of ends up at this house because she gets like lost in the street and this elderly couple sees emily her former kid's um address like written inside her chaps um just like oh we should bring this kid back to her owner um and it turns out um that the sort of current inhabitants of the house like it's slightly implicit but basically like the girl who lives there who's roughly bonnie's age is a horse girl um and so and it's like well you know why would this kid who lives in the same house happen to like the same doll like 20 30 years later and it's like oh because she's a horse girl because there's actually like this is a house with a stable attached right and so it draws a kid who is into horses and therefore like there's that connection, which is, I think, is a really like sort of smart, just like mechanical bit of writing.

8:57Yeah. But, you know, basically takes Jesse back to the scene of this emotional crime.

9:07Sam, you felt so many feelings about this. Yes. I mean, you can tell right from the beginning that it's just going to murder you if you if you were, you know, have that feelings about the original, about Toy Story 2. When somebody loved me Everything was beautiful Every hour we spent together Lives within my heart And when she was sad Randy Newman didn't write the song for this movie that sort of was famously Taylor Swift, but he did the score, and he wrote When She Loves Me, which is the Sarah McLachlan song from Toy Story 2. And it's like right at the beginning of the score, he like works in that musical theme.

9:53And I swear it comes back. Like I would like to see the movie again just to count, but it's gotta be half a dozen times. In this movie, like it's just merciless in weaving that theme in. They just like sneak it back in like, Sam, Sam, Sam, it's still sad. I mean, there's a reason that Sarah McLachlan is still the king of like sad animal TikToks. Like her voice just will, it just will break you up like nobody else's. That's it for now. And if you want to hear the rest of this episode, the way to do it is to subscribe to Slate Plus. Unlock Slate Plus now by going to slate.com forward slash whatnextplus.