Toy Story 5 comes for big tech, but does the moral lesson land?

But for all its emotional intelligence, Toy Story 5 lets big-tech off remarkably lightly. Like all good villains, Lilypad is eventually reformed, having learnt her lesson and questioning whether she’s done more harm than good by encouraging Bonnie to play with her constantly.

Lilypad is inevitably welcomed into the group of other toys and becomes an additional part of the gang, taking photos for Bonnie’s make-believe toy weddings.

But this positions big-tech and its products as something inherently neutral, only damaging when used the wrong way.

Tom Hanks and Tim Allen tell us they were devastated when Bonnie got cyberbullied in ‘TOY STORY 5’.

“It’s a silent moment. You read what has been said. You see how it registers on Bonnie’s face. It was heartbreaking.” pic.twitter.com/o3J4CHhgm3

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) June 28, 2026

This fundamentally glosses over an uncomfortable reality: the products children use today are not passive objects waiting to be picked up and put down. They’re designed to resist exactly that.

Modern apps, games and platforms compete in what behavioural scientists call the attention economy, where success is measured by time spent scrolling. Children haven’t outgrown imaginative play because they collectively decided dolls were boring. They’re participating in a system that has become extraordinarily good at making screens difficult to ignore.

By reducing Big Tech to a lovable frog-shaped gadget capable of guilt and redemption, it transforms a structural problem into a personal one. If only the real world worked like that.

Unlike Lilypad, tech companies don’t wake up one morning and decide they’ve been monopolising children’s attention for too long. Their commercial success depends upon precisely the opposite. The longer young users stay engaged, the more valuable they become.

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect a Pixar film to launch a scathing critique of surveillance capitalism. This is, after all, Disney — one of the world’s largest entertainment corporations — telling children to be wary of digital ecosystems while simultaneously selling them branded ones.

But that contradiction is precisely what makes Toy Story 5 so fascinating. The result is a film that asks children to rethink their relationship with technology without encouraging the parents to ask nearly enough of the companies who have designed that relationship in the first place.

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