US actor Tom Hanks has said the latest Toy Story film highlights children’s addiction to screens, an issue that he says strikes “terror in the heart”.
The fifth instalment of the animated franchise sees Woody, Buzz and Jessie threatened by a new frog-like tablet known as Lilypad, which captivates the film’s children.
Hanks said the cast related to the storyline because they had all “met that disinterest” of young people who “look down at their phone, look up, look down, look up”.
“This is a generational thing,” he told the BBC’s David Sillito, “where one generation has this thing that defines them technologically in society, and they pour everything into it.”
The actor highlighted “a moment in the movie where we look out on the cityscape and we see that blue glow of a phone in bedrooms and whatnot, and it does strike terror into the heart”.
Toy Story 5, released later this month, sees Hanks, Tim Allen and Joan Cusack return to their roles voicing Woody, Buzz Lightyear and Jessie, while Past Lives star Greta Lee joins the cast to voice Lilypad.
Villains in previous Toy Story movies have included a large purple teddy bear called Lotso, troubled next-door neighbour Sid, a ruthless toy collector named Al and creepy vintage doll Gabby Gabby.
But the new enemy of technology in Toy Story 5 is an altogether different beast.
It’s a battleground that parents everywhere will recognise, and the film comes at a time of wider debate about the potential harms of too much screen time, particularly social media.
Allen, who voices Buzz Lightyear, recalled how he recently took his teenage daughter to the cinema, but she struggled to concentrate for the whole film because children “are so used to seven-second movies on Instagram”, he said.
His daughter dismissed the film they were watching early on, Allen explained, because she’d already got the gist of what was going to happen.
“She actually looked at a motion picture and went, ‘I get it! He’s going to be the villain and they’re going to do this’,” he recalled.
“We had a little argument, I said, ‘from now on, if we go to movie theatres, we watch the movie, and you can [complain] about it afterwards’. But she wasn’t wrong.”
Allen said young people are “so used to a beginning, middle and end arc in seven seconds” that they struggle with a two-hour movie, “other than Avatar”, he added, “which is an experience”.
A new song by Taylor Swift called I Knew It, I Knew You, will feature on the forthcoming film’s soundtrack. The singer said she had “always dreamed of getting to write for these characters who I’ve adored since I was a five-year-old kid.”
Before its release in 1995, critics did not expect much from the original Toy Story, which was seen as a children’s movie with the added gimmick of being the first ever entirely computer-animated film.
But Toy Story had an engaging storyline and sharp script to match its impressive visuals. Kids naturally loved the idea of toys coming to life, while some sharp jokes were sprinkled in for their parents.
Allen said it had been “really startling” when he and the team saw what the film would look like for the first time, adding the aesthetic took some getting used to.
“Anybody who saw the first one, compared to cell animation, thought it looked weird. It looked like, ‘what are we watching?’ But the story was really clever and they put it together with the two of us,” he said, referring to himself and Hanks.
Early edits of the film showed promise, but, Allen noted, it took a while for the creative team to find the comedy, and for Woody and Buzz’s character traits to develop.
“They shot one that didn’t come out so good,” he said. “They made one that was a little bit too caustic.
“The two characters were fighting the whole time, it wasn’t very interesting. But then they made Woody be a little more understanding and Buzz a little, forgive the word, dumber.
“He was self-delusional, he didn’t realise that he was a toy. And it was really quite interesting. And that was new. They’d never done this before.”
Toy Story’s success prompted several sequels, as well as 2022’s Buzz spin-off Lightyear, and generated huge sales of the toys featured in the film.
But while the previous movies in the series have remained largely in the toy world, the fifth film is the first to grapple with the issue of technology, highlighting both its benefits and risks.
Critics have yet to give their verdict on the latest film and how effective it is at tackling the issue.
Cusack said she thought it would “resonate” with parents who are wrestling with screen time limits.
But, Allen acknowledged, every generation has its own debate about certain technology, and his parents had similar concerns when he was young.
“As soon as I said ‘put that phone down’, I remember my parents going ‘turn the music off’,” he laughed.
“Once FM radio came to the United States, and we started getting rock’n’roll, we listened to music all the time, my parents were saying ‘turn that off’, everywhere we went we had to have music playing.
“So there’s some memory of this, and then once we got TV we wanted to watch TV all the time. So it’s been around, the evolution of this has been around.”
