Overload: "Toy Story 5"

These late-in-the-day Toy Story sequels and spinoffs may have spoilt the neatness of the original trilogy, but they've been far from shy about addressing social and systemic change. If you were feeling academic, you could compile a more than workable thesis out of the ways the franchise's toybox favourites have been deployed - and rearranged, and redeployed - to illustrate shifts in progressive Hollywood thinking over the past thirty years, away from those trad masculine fantasies of cowboys, spacemen and soldiers (the prime movers in the 1995 original) and towards cowgirls and ragdolls. Show us where the industry hurt you. Toy Story 5 effectively completes this transition. Now Woody and Buzz (voiced, once again, by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen) play second fiddle to Jessie (Joan Cusack), sent away from the other toys to work through her formative abandonment trauma; and with Andy and Sid long out of the picture, proprietory ownership of the toys has fallen to young Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), an awkward, friendless tot so desperate for connection to her peers that her angsty parents invest in a digital device, the frog-shaped Lilypad (Greta Lee), which starts to hog all our girl's leisure time and relegates the old gang to the cold of the family garage. The new film is at its most illuminating in examining the impact of such tech on its humanoid characters' lives: coming just a week or so after Spielberg's phone-smashing Disclosure Day, it suggests the studio suits have been properly rattled by the online barbarians amassing at the gates, in the same way their Fifties predecessors were by television. Show me how the Internet is eating into your market share.

This is also, alas, the source of one of the core frustrations with Toy Story 5. Where previously this series has offered the universal pleasures of good stories with engaging characters, dazzling setpieces and funny jokes, this instalment sometimes feels like an elaborate PowerPoint presentation being given by producers to similarly concerned parents (perhaps with support from Keir Starmer's government): the messaging precludes any lasting merriment. It is, at any rate, another cluttered late sequel, having to stretch and strain to find something for earlier fan favourites to do, following a small army of Buzz Lightyears (presumably survivors of 2022's spinoff Lightyear) through a vaguely determined B-plot, while shuttling on new characters, generally American toys ("Combat Carl", some sort of pottytraining device voiced by Conan O'Brien) who will mean no more to overseas audiences than those nightly cutaways to American sports stars watching on from corporate sponsors' boxes at the World Cup. Previously, this series gave us one story at a time, told well; now, however, we've arrived at the (monkey) barrel-scraping stage, which means three or four half-ideas - some cut from earlier scripts, others retrieved from bottom drawers - worked through half as well. The writing has dulled: the jokes aren't as funny, smug callbacks predominate, and the stories being told by the grown-up creatives in charge - here, Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL-E) and newcomer Kenna Harris - prove barely more coherent than those the kids tell within the film itself.

Every now and again, something clicks as it used to, the muscle memory kicks in. As Woody and Buzz duke it out in Bonnie's bedroom over which of them Jessie deputised first, Hanks and Allen fall back into their winning comic rhythms; but they're sidelined for much of the film and total bystanders in the most potent scene, as Bonnie turns down a reunion with Jessie and her horse Bullseye out of shame. Visually, the new film is still impressive - but it would be even more impressive if we hadn't already seen so much of these characters and this world. A sequence on a hilltop involving Jessie, a tree, Bullseye and another, actual horse sits among the loveliest this franchise has ever given us - but then it's back to pell-mell, half-arsed plotting, faux hand-drawn fantasias, a hundred thousand pixels a second. Here is a digimation that knows from creative experience how hard it can be to step away from the CPU and the laptop: the tech has clearly made this plenitude of imagery possible, but it's also made it far less special, much less of an event. Five films down the pipeline, we're left with a mechanical reproduction of former glories. So this, then, is summer 2026: a Star War that resembled two episodes of telly, Spielberg not quite meeting the moment, and Toy Story: The College Years. Something really is shifting before our eyes: you can bet a lot of fingers are presently being crossed that Christopher Nolan, at least, has got it together - or that one of those YouTubers they have nowadays will hop off their Lilypad long enough to pluck a compelling new idea out of the ether.

Toy Story 5 is now showing in cinemas nationwide.