"It's not about disappearing, nor about being replaced. It's simply about finding your own value among more choices."
"Toy Story," Pixar's flagship franchise that has been with us for three long decades, has returned after seven years. The fifth installment, "Toy Story 5," is set in an era where toys are giving way to tablets, yet it does not portray this as a simple tale of loss. The film focuses on beings that preserve their own roles and values even amid the currents of change, prompting us to reflect on the value we must not forget in a rapidly changing world.
The film opens in the room of children for whom the smart tablet "Lilypad" has become part of everyday life. The children's attention no longer rests on toys alone. Woody, Buzz, and Jessie—who once had Bonnie's love all to themselves—soon find themselves pushed into a corner of the room. The weathered Woody is called "grandpa," and Buzz is treated as an "ancestor" by the latest model toys. At first glance, it may seem like a sad story of toys being displaced by digital devices, but the film's gaze is surprisingly calm, warm, and lighthearted.
In particular, the film does not divide toys and digital devices into a dichotomy of good and evil. The tablet is not an enemy that steals children's imagination. Lilypad, too, is portrayed as a being that sincerely wishes for Bonnie's happiness. The perspective that toys have not vanished after outliving their usefulness, but rather that a new option has simply been added to children's world, reveals the warm worldview the film embraces.
Of course, the unique value of toys is clear. If tablets are tools that expand a world of information and stimulation, toys are friends of analog sentiment that nurture imagination and emotion within a child's embrace. The hand-worn warmth and connection that digital devices cannot replace ultimately become the force that leads to pain, comfort, and growth.
But the message "Toy Story 5" delivers is not directed only at children. In an age where artificial intelligence (AI) is changing every aspect of our daily lives and new technologies emerge endlessly, we live amid the anxiety that one day our value may disappear. Adults, too, live in fear that something younger, newer, and more efficient could replace them.
That is why the crisis faced by Woody, Buzz, and Jessie in the film is not a story about toys alone. To those who fear change, to those anxious that their roles and places might someday disappear, the film offers gentle and plain comfort. Yielding your place to someone does not mean the meaning of your existence disappears as well. Even if we no longer stand at the center, we can keep living, finding new roles and values in our own ways. What the work ultimately speaks of is not replacement but coexistence, not loss but change.
Through an imaginative world rendered in pastel tones, the film summons memories of childhood, when a single doll could fill an entire day. The image of the toys watching Bonnie, who no longer seeks them out, evokes the feeling of those moments when we drift little by little away from familiar things. In this way, the work calmly reminds us, through the time of growth that everyone experiences, that change is not the same as loss.
The scene Tom Hanks foreshadowed as "the saddest scene in the series" can instead be called the highlight of this work. Someone leaves, and someone finds a new place. It is because, in the moment we accept the self-evident truth that "nothing lasts forever," we grow, and we realize that this is how we become adults.
The thrill of meeting and the regret of parting, the fear of change and the joy of growth. As it passes through those countless moments, "Toy Story 5" calmly tells us that we have grown into adults little by little. That is why this work is not a simple sequel but closer to a coming-of-age narrative offered by a series that has grown alongside us. It is a story revisited by the children who grew up watching the first film in 1995, now parents themselves, and a comfort that the time we spent together never disappears.
The film tells us that "what we love does not disappear, but always remains somewhere by our side." That something may be a toy, a memory of childhood, or a recollection of someone who was once most precious. Perhaps it is the value of our own existence, which we feared might fall behind the pace of change. Time flows forward, but the things we loved do not completely vanish. Even as their forms change and their places shift, those moments accumulate within us and make us who we are today.
"Toy Story 5," back after seven years, is a gift-like work for longtime fans. And it quietly offers comfort to those who fear change, and to those anxious that their place might someday disappear. That they are not disappearing, nor being replaced. That we are simply finding our own new places among more choices.
