Toy Story 4

Pixar spent the better part of a decade insisting it was done. Toy Story 3 was built and sold as an ending, a film about letting go that closed on the single most cathartic handoff in the studio's history, Andy passing his toys to Bonnie and driving away. It was the kind of finale that dares you to ask for more, and for nine years the honest answer was that no one needed to. So the first and largest question hanging over Toy Story 4 is not whether it is good, Pixar sequels are almost always at least good, it is whether it justifies reopening a door the last film shut so perfectly. The strange, slightly conflicted truth is that it mostly does, even as it spends a fair amount of its runtime reminding you why the door was closed in the first place.

Directed by Josh Cooley in his feature debut, Toy Story 4 picks up not long after the third film, with Woody struggling to find his place in Bonnie's room now that he is no longer the favorite. When Bonnie crafts a spork named Forky into a makeshift toy on her first day of kindergarten, Woody appoints himself the unstable creation's protector, and a road trip with Bonnie's family sends the pair tumbling into an antique store presided over by a vintage pull-string doll named Gabby Gabby and out toward a carnival where Woody reunites with a long-lost Bo Peep. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen return as Woody and Buzz, Tony Hale voices Forky, Christina Hendricks gives Gabby Gabby her ache, and Keanu Reeves, Annie Potts, and the team of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele also star.

To be clear, the strongest thing this movie has going for it is that it is funny, and it knows exactly when to be. Tony Hale's Forky is the engine of the first act, a googly-eyed existential crisis on a pipe cleaner who wants nothing more than to hurl himself back into the trash, and the running gag of Woody hauling him back from open windows lands every time. The opening montage is some of the sharpest physical comedy Pixar has done. The animation, meanwhile, is doing quiet, astonishing work in the background. There is a certain plasticity to the character models that keeps the humans in that familiar Pixar register, but the environments, the rain-slicked carnival, the dust and clutter of the antique store, are rendered with a richness that flirts with photorealism without tipping into it. Gabby Gabby is the film's real emotional engine, a villain whose entire menace is rooted in a broken voice box and a belief that being made whole will make her lovable, and the moment she finally gets her chance with a child and is gently turned down is the most quietly devastating beat in the movie. Her eventual resolution, finding a lost little girl at the carnival, earns its tears.

That said, this is not a 5, and the reason is structural. The auxiliary cast might as well not be here, and cutting them would shave a good twenty minutes off the runtime without costing the film a thing. This is the most surprising weakness in a Toy Story movie, because the ensemble was always the point, the crowded toy box bouncing off one another. Here Buzz is reduced to a subplot about listening to his "inner voice" that functions mainly to keep him busy, and he is entirely removable from the central story. Rex, the Potato Heads, and Slinky do almost nothing once the RV leaves. The prologue flashback explaining how Bo Peep was given away feels tacked on, an obligation to remind younger audiences who she is rather than a story beat the film actually needs, especially since Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 already acknowledged toys get lost and sold. The movie is fundamentally about Woody, Forky, and Bo Peep, and everyone else is set dressing.

The bigger problem is the ending, and since this is a spoiler review, here it is plainly: Woody chooses to stay behind with Bo Peep rather than return to Bonnie, leaving his friends and his entire identity as a kid's toy behind. Whether that lands depends entirely on a variable the movie is weirdly cagey about, which is how much time has passed since the third film. The character work makes the most sense the closer you place this to Toy Story 3. If only a little time has gone by, Woody is a toy who was handed off to a child who does not really want him, who has no place in this new room, and walking away to find purpose elsewhere tracks emotionally. But the farther out you push it, the less it holds, because the longer he has spent settling into life with Bonnie, the stranger it is that he would abandon the family he chose. The film makes a point of telling you nine years passed before Bo Peep was given away, then declines to give you any frame of reference for the gap between three and four, which is an odd thing to be precise about in one place and vague about in the one place it matters.

It is worth noting there was a leaner, sharper version of this story sitting right there. The most affecting throughline is Woody appointing himself Forky's protector, and you can see the cleaner film where Woody does for Forky what he once did for Buzz in the original, talks a panicked new toy into believing it matters, with the wrinkle that Forky actively does not want to be saved. That version, Woody getting Forky back to Bonnie and finding his own renewed purpose in the doing, is a more interesting movie than the one that sends him off into the sunset. What is here is still strong. It is just visibly not the strongest cut of itself.

At the end of the day, none of this is me running down the movie, and the box office is going to make that question academic anyway. People are going to see this one regardless of what any review says, and you should. It is very funny, it is beautiful to look at, it runs a merciful hundred minutes in a season that has tested everyone's patience with bloated runtimes, and it is a solidly good family film. The reservations are real, but they are the reservations of a movie reaching for greatness and landing just short, which is a much better problem to have than most sequels manage. Hopefully Pixar takes the hint this time and lets the toys rest, because that final shot of Woody and Bo is a perfectly good place to leave them. Whether the studio can resist a fifth is another matter entirely.

★ ★ ★ ★