- toy story 5 does not have Woody and Buzz as main characters
- Jessie is the main toy-based protagonist of the film.
- Its co-writer and director says he didn’t intentionally plan for that to happen.
The co-writer and director of toy story 5 has revealed that he “never planned” for Jessie to replace Woody and Buzz as his main character.
In an exclusive chat with TechRadar, Andrew Stanton admitted that he didn’t approach the story of the new Pixar film with that goal in mind. However, while he and fellow writer Kenna Harris were brainstorming ideas for the fifth entry of the toy story franchise, it became clear that Jessie, and not Buzz and Woody, had to be the focal point of the film.
In fact, as Stanton explained, discussions about what a fifth toy story The film could pick up three years after the most recent installment in the film series, also known as toy story 4. At the time, neither he nor anyone at Pixar or parent company Disney had a specific story idea in mind for what they and/or audiences would want to see.
It wasn’t until Stanton sat down, first alone and then with Harris, that he began to fully visualize toy story 5The ‘toys meet technology’ narrative and its adjacent themes of screen addiction, childhood loneliness in the digital age, and toy obsolescence.
The last of those narrative threads was key to unlocking Jessie’s lead role in one of the most anticipated new movies of 2026. Until now, fans have only gotten a glimpse of Jessie’s past life through toy story 2which revealed that she had been owned by a girl named Emily before being abandoned on the side of a road in a donation box when Emily overtook her. Ultimately, it was filling in the gaps of this decades-old mystery that helped Stanton and Harris not only build toy story 5The plot revolves around Jessie, but makes her its central character.
“We never planned that,” Stanton told me about establishing Jessie as the film’s protagonist. “Basically, in 2022 they asked me if I would be interested in doing toy story 5 and I said ‘what’s the idea?’ They told me no one had one, so I said, ‘Well, I know these movies take years to make, so it has to be an idea I really like.’ Let me write something and if I like it enough, I’ll want to work on it.’
“But I knew that Jessie’s past was always something I wanted to address,” he continued. “So that was an ingredient that I definitely wanted to deal with. I also knew that I wanted to do something on devices, which had been around for a few years at that point, and would get into the hands of younger and younger kids. Later, I had the idea of wanting to see 50 Buzz Lightyears in a multi-connected way, which ties into the technological theme of the movie, but in a good way. Mix all that together and we had the elements to form our movie.”
toy story 5 will be released in theaters worldwide on Friday, June 19. For more exclusive coverage ahead of release, find out why Pixar has no plans to tell a toy story movie without Woody, Buzz and Jessie yet.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to receive news, reviews and opinions from our experts in your feeds.
