First, we were playing. Then the world began to change, and suddenly, so much was left wondering what it was still good for. Imagine a game we have all played — one we never chose to leave behind, until the day we realized we had. Toy Story 5 is a special movie.
Spoilers ahead! This Post-Theater Digest reflects on key quotes from the film (in bold) and what we can draw from them. Quotes and reflective thoughts are pulled directly from the movie — read at your own discretion!
This post is about the movie Toy Story 5. Directed by Andrew Stanton. Starring Joan Cusack, Tom Hanks, and Tim Allen.
To Make A Child Happy
They’re just antiques. A play that lives to be so much more when you adventure into make-believe. In the youth of what you do not yet know, to ignite imagination is the proof that, somehow, you already do.
That’s why it hurts so much not to make friends: there is a love within you that you know you were meant to have, even as you are made to feel useless without it. That is a game you are forced to play. The gift is realizing you do not have to.
We can’t decide how growing up happens but there are some things that we can’t put away. And perhaps that is what you’ll come to love forever.
Toy Story 5 plays in the deep places of youth we still recognize today, bringing them to life in a world all its own. Between toys and screens, devices and games, it follows the things we turn to for both joy and pain—where friendship can bring as many tears as it does smiles.
Key Quotes & Reflections
Still Playing With Toys
“Look at them all, all on devices…she’s the only one out there still playing with toy”
~ Jessie
Back to where it all started, in more ways than one. How quickly there is pain as you make for fun. When left to the devices of everyone else, what is the age that you lose yourself? Time may change but the game never does. So you need your Woody and your Buzz. Suit yourself with the need to protect, because every kid deserves a friend.
I Will Love You Forever. Can love be forever in what must move on? The callback to this truth is not my favorite song.
Why Won’t Anyone Be My Friend? A question that lives where pain begins. You can live your whole life with the scars of this, with these wounds making way for more.
The Age of Toys Is Over. Or so they say, is the play in the toys or the toys of the play? Find what there is to surmount along the way.
She’s The Only One Still Playing With Toys. What you don’t have is what everyone lacks.
Toys Are For Play But Tech Is For Everything. Is everything really so far gone?
Change So Fast
“She’s creative and silly in a way other kids don’t get…”
~ Jessie
Pain knows its first fruits in what you never asked to lose; it’s hard to return to what we did not choose. You may be surprised by how much we resemble one another in this way. After all, do we not each deserve the right to be saved?
Make for the journey; understanding softens the heart. This world is here to hold us each, a place for all to play their part.
I’m Back Home…This Is Where It All Started. Home is where the heart is, its joys and aches, laughs and troubles.
Do You Have Any Idea What That’s Like? You’ll be surprised how much we all do.
You Devices Make Them Grow Up So Fast. The sadness of this is the innocence that does not last, and the mind taken by every passing fad. There is a right to grieve what is lost, but never to subject those still growing to the bitterness of it.
I Will Never Play That Game. Until you do, and for the better you see that it’s all a choice to choose.
That My Friend Was Playing. When we soften our hearts toward those of this life too, we can passage gifts we all have been freely given.
Don’t Be Dumping Something You Can’t Flush. Yeah…don’t.
Do You Wanna Play?
“We wouldn’t change a single thing about you, and we think a real friend would feel the same. Don’t you?”
~ Bonnie’s mom
Project so much of how you feel, and eventually, it is you who sees it. Running so far into your pain, distance is what you needed for an answer. Not the one you grieved to receive, but the one made clear to you: a play of things you could not see, living for your good.
It’s not you, I’m the one who’s useless. To think this of ourselves, how so much it grieves me.
Did something happen with your friends? Were they ever ones to begin with?
I can’t do this again. I can’t love another kid to find out I never mattered, I can’t… To know pain is to succumb to the thoughts of what you can’t do. What is there to tell you you can?
If they become friends it’s all worth it. To make a friend, truly, it will always be worth it.
She deserves better. We all do.
This is flying with style. What falling with style could never be.
Do you want to play? To think they’d never ask.
To The Believer
The mind makes real what it cannot see, while the heart bears the weight of what it does. There is a particular grief in knowing that a soul, still so early beneath the sun, can travel through such depths of suffering.
Yet play invites benevolence into chaos. It brings order to what has been constructed and restores a kind of reign to the untethered being. In its practice, we are reminded that life can be made grand again—not by denying what is before us, but through the things we are willing to believe into being.
Growing up is to discover there is truth in this: peace lives in the practice of knowing. It is not something we are meant to outgrow, nor something we are meant to stop playing with. An effort of the heart to be made in this life, to experience the life there after.
“…and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
~ Matthew 18:3-4
Further Reflections
Toy Story: Falling With Style
I implore you to think back to when you lived to imagine, when more of life was lived out of sight than within it…
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio: A Wonderful Gift
When you try your best and that’s the best you can do, you see this life is a wonderful gift…
How To Train Your Dragon: All That is Uniquely You
Find what you had yet to build was all that separated you, from the heights you had yet to reach.
Credit: Script excerpts and select images from *Toy Story 5* (© Disney/Pixar) are included for purposes of reflection and thematic analysis.
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