Pixar has made a film about toys competing with tablets for children’s attention. Tom Hanks, the voice of Woody, called it a portrait of “terror.” The irony is so complete it wraps around and bites itself.
Let’s be precise about what’s happening here. A toy franchise—a thing designed to be sold to children as a physical object—has spent thirty years teaching children that the real magic happens when you play with toys. Now that franchise is releasing a $200 million film warning children that screens are bad. The film itself is a screen. Children will watch it on screens. The toys from the film will then be sold to those children, who will film themselves unboxing them and post the videos to screens.
Woody and Buzz are experiencing an existential crisis because a tablet exists. This is presented as the emotional core of the narrative. A sentient cowboy doll is terrified of consumer electronics. The solution, presumably, is to buy more dolls.
Tom Hanks described the film’s central conflict as capturing the “terror” of screen addiction. He did not describe it as capturing the terror of a toy manufacturer realizing their market is collapsing because actual tech companies have better engagement metrics. That would be honest. Instead, we get Woody having a breakdown about relevance while sitting on a shelf in a child’s bedroom that probably has a ring light in it.
The real comedy is that Pixar knows exactly what they’re doing. They’re not making a sincere PSA about screen time. They’re making a film that will trend on TikTok, generate merchandising opportunities, and spawn think pieces about parenting. The “message” about tablets is window dressing. The actual message is: buy these toys, watch this movie, feel guilty about your phone, then buy more toys to compensate for that guilt.
Does the film actually work as entertainment? That depends on whether you find it compelling to watch a plastic cowboy doll panic about obsolescence. For children, it probably does—they’re the target audience, and they don’t yet understand that they’re being sold a product that exists to make them feel bad about products they already own. For parents, it’s a two-hour permission slip to feel like they’re addressing the screen addiction problem by purchasing a theater ticket and a toy tie-in.
The genius is that nobody loses. Pixar gets their box office. Toy manufacturers get their shelf space. Tech companies keep their users. Parents get to feel like they’re parenting. Children get a movie. Everyone walks out of the theater and goes home to their screens, where they’ll see ads for the toys they just watched a character panic about not having.
Woody’s terror is real. It’s just not about tablets. It’s about a $30 plastic figure trying to justify its existence in a world where engagement is measured in dopamine hits per second, and nobody’s getting those from a cowboy doll anymore. The film is his suicide note, but it’s also his marketing campaign. He’s terrified and he’s selling merchandise. Both things are true. Both things are the same thing.
Toy Story 5 will make hundreds of millions of dollars. Children will ask for the toys. Parents will buy them. The toys will sit in closets next to the toys from Toy Story 1 through 4. The tablets will keep working. Pixar will make Toy Story 6, in which Woody confronts his mortality by acknowledging that nothing he does matters anymore, and that’s fine, because the real product was always the feeling of buying something to solve a problem that the feeling of buying something created in the first place.