After 31 Years, Toy Story Is Officially Changing Its Most Important Relationship - MCE Notices | California State Portal

In the coming days, the release of Toy Story 5 will give Pixar’s first movie franchise a new lease of life. It will also mark a significant change in the central focus of this groundbreaking animated saga about children’s toys coming to life.

Everything we know so far about Toy Story 5 suggests its plot will be resolved in a way that shifts our attention from the protagonists we’re used to rooting for, in order to create a different kind of relationship between two other characters. Woody, Buzz, and Jessie will still be there, but they will no longer be the main point.

Pixar’s big 2026 movie release depicts the original Toy Story ensemble coming to terms with the rise of screen-based mobile devices with artificial intelligence, which threaten to take their place in the life of their young owner, Bonnie. At the same time, Jessie will find herself transported back to the childhood home of her former owner, Emily.

These events combine to set the stage for Toy Story 5’s biggest change to the franchise. The movie’s central twist isn’t the advent of tech-based home entertainment for children, after all. It’s that toys have a greater purpose, beyond their own relationships with the kids who own them.

Toy Story 5 Features Two Children As Main Characters Playing Together

Toy Story 5 will feature Jessie’s return to the first place she felt truly loved by a child, as she’s sent back to the former home of Emily, the girl depicted in Toy Story 2’s tearjerking flashback sequence. Yet, this subplot turns out to be the catalyst for an even more significant bond to be formed between two other characters.

As previously revealed by Entertainment Weekly, the new movie will introduce Blaze as the young toy lover now living in Emily’s old house. It’s Blaze who returns Jessie to her old home, via an online auction purchase instigated by Bonnie’s new AI toy Lilypad, as is briefly previewed in one of the trailers for Toy Story 5.

To bring the old gang back together, then, Woody and Buzz are going to have to bring Bonnie and Blaze together, too, perhaps with Lilypad’s help. We can expect to see the two children playing together, in a way that’s never happened before with two main-character toy owners in the Toy Story franchise.

Blaze might be a little older than Bonnie, but their shared love of classic toys feels like the perfect basis for a new friendship. This relationship will signal a significant change to what Toy Story is all about.

Kids have played together in the franchise before, from Andy’s birthday party in the first movie, to the playtime scenes in Toy Story 3. But, Andy aside, none of the kids in question have been main characters with a key role in the story, and play as a shared activity has been irrelevant to any overarching plot.

Bonnie And Blaze’s Friendship Marks A Major Shift In Toy Story’s Focus

Toy Story 5 won’t just be about toys coming together, or even toys and their owners. Because of the potential friendship between Bonnie and Blaze, it will be about the physical act of play as a means of children meeting and socializing together. As Woody puts it during the movie’s first trailer, “Toys are for play, but tech is for… everything.”

In fact, it appears to be a theme of the story that kids lose sight of what it means to play together when they’re glued to the screens of their devices. One trailer scene shows Bonnie and three of her peers sat alone, together, in physical proximity but not interacting in any way.

This scene is a marked contrast to the shared joy in children like Bonnie and Blaze playing together with actual toys. It’s long been anticipated that Toy Story 5 is switching the franchise’s main character to Jessie, but the movie is actually going much further, by switching up the role of all its toys.

This time around, toys won’t just be looking out for themselves and each other, while entertaining their owners. They’ll be a means of bringing young humans together, turning the social development of children into their ultimate purpose.

In this way, it transforms the movie’s franchise’s most important relationship. Toy Story 5 is about how toy owners relate to one another, rather than the relationship they have to their toys.