When the trailer for Toy Story 5 arrived yesterday, it revealed something surprisingly uncomfortable. The villain isn’t a greedy toy shop owner, tyrannical teddy bear, or misunderstood new addition to the toy box. This time, they’re facing a tablet.
And for the first time in the franchise’s history, the threat to playtime isn’t neglect. It’s total abandonment.
As someone who reviews technology for a living, I spend most of my time celebrating innovation. I’m constantly testing faster phones, smarter smartwatches and more immersive TV screens. There’s no denying tech makes life easier. But watching that trailer, I didn’t feel defensive. I felt seen.
I’m also the parent of a three-year-old, and despite building a career around gadgets, I’ve made a conscious effort to keep tablets and smartphones out of his hands for now. Not because I’m anti-tech, but because I understand exactly how addictive these devices are. They’re designed to hold your attention, with bright colours, instant feedback, and endless content. Even adults struggle to put them down. Expecting a toddler to self-regulate against that is unrealistic.
Of course, I know this won’t last forever. At some point, he’ll have a phone. He’ll use a laptop at school. Technology will become part of his daily life, just as it has for everyone else. The challenge isn’t avoiding it entirely; it’s figuring out when to introduce it and how to keep it from becoming all-consuming.
That conversation is already happening beyond the home. Schools across the UK have begun banning smartphones during the school day. This is a practical response to what teachers are seeing in classrooms, where attention spans are shorter and distraction is constant.
There’s also a growing shift away from assuming more screens equals better learning. Studies show students retain information better when writing by hand compared to typing. Pen and paper force your brain to slow down, allowing it to process and retain the information better.
Am I just getting old?
Watching the trailer also made me realise how different childhood looks now compared to when I grew up. As a millennial, I feel like I experienced technology at exactly the right pace. In prep school there was one computer in the corner of the classroom that everyone took turns using. Mobile phones were a thing by senior school, but only as simple tools for texting friends or arranging where to meet. Social media wasn’t always within reach. When you left the house, you disconnected completely.
We still had technology, of course. MSN Messenger, early iPods, and home PCs were early 2000s in a nutshell. But they didn’t dominate every spare moment. Boredom was an unavoidable, but ultimately valuable part of growing up.
Today, boredom barely exists, and that’s the tension at the heart of what Pixar is exploring. The animation studio has always been good at spotting emotional truths before the rest of us fully articulate them: the original Toy Story was about growing up; Toy Story 4 was about moving on.
In Toy Story 5, Woody and Buzz – voiced once again by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen – represent childhood imagination. And that’s what feels at risk.
Technology isn’t inherently bad, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. It enables creativity, learning, and connection in ways that were unimaginable when I was growing up. But it also makes it easy to replace effort with convenience, and imagination with consumption. That’s why shiny, confident, always-on tablet Lilypad makes perfect sense as a villain. Not because tablets are evil, but because of what they represent.
Technology will always be part of our lives. It should be. But Toy Story 5 will hopefully be a reminder that we need better balance. And coming from someone whose job exists because of technology, that’s not easy to admit.
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