Pixar's technology has advanced so far since the original Toy Story came out in 1995 that the studio had to deliberately restrain itself for the new sequel. According to CNET, producer Lindsey Collins described the balancing act the filmmakers faced going into production on Toy Story 5.
"There's a lot of restraint," Collins said. "We don't want to all of a sudden feel like we've jumped so far ahead technologically that these don't even feel like the same characters anymore or the same world."
The film introduces Blaze, a new human character with tight, curly hair. Pixar had not built tools to render that look before, so the team developed them from scratch. Collins said the technology is now available for future Pixar productions, which could open the door to more diverse character designs going forward.
The film also features stylized sequences that visualize the imagination of Bonnie, the child at the center of the story. Those sequences were designed to look like watercolor paintings, with soft edges and muted pastel tones. Co-director Kenna Harris described the goal behind them.
"We wanted to give it much more of a mind's eye feel," Harris said. "That's something that Pixar doesn't have as much practice with."
Creating that simplified, hand-painted look turned out to be harder than it sounds. Despite the deliberately unfinished appearance, the sequences required extensive development time and internal testing. Director Andrew Stanton recognized early in production that the work needed a dedicated team, Harris said. Stanton also shaped other aspects of the production with a particular approach in mind, though full details were not released before publication.
The new film sits inside a franchise that has tracked Pixar's technical evolution for more than three decades. Past films pushed the studio's tools in different directions, from the expressive skeletons in Coco to the hyperrealistic rainstorm in Toy Story 4. Toy Story 5 continues that pattern, but with a different philosophy: the improvements are mostly invisible, intended to preserve rather than reinvent the world audiences already know.
The narrative of the film also engages directly with questions about technology. The toy characters face a threat from a new tablet device named Lilypad that Bonnie receives. Collins addressed the theme of technology and creativity in the story.
"We're a technology company, so we're not sitting here going, 'Oh no, how dare you -- tech?'" Collins said. Instead, she said, the filmmakers explored the nuances of how technology shapes daily life, including both its benefits and its costs.
