Written by Nishant Shah and Maya Indira Ganesh
When the first Toy Story came out in 1995, it was embraced as a story of friendship between Andy and his toys. Underneath that warmth, it was also a story about technologies: What they promise, threaten, and how they become toys.
Woody, the pull-string cowboy, fears being replaced by Buzz Lightyear, the technogizmo spaceman who arrives with lights, wings, buttons, and a full mythology built in. Buzz is not a villain. He is a toy that does not know he is a toy. He gains that wisdom only when the film returns him to play.
Toys are technologies in the most expansive sense of the word. They extend a child’s imagination, but only after the child takes hold of them. The child makes the toy speak differently, bends it into a story it was not designed to tell, and creates a world in which the technology becomes toyhood.
From Tangible Totems to the Algorithmic Panopticon
Toy Story 5 returns to that first drama of replacement. Bonnie gets a tablet — Lilypad — and the older toys again face a newer technology. Bonnie is smitten by the shiny thing that listens, remembers, and responds. The older toys once needed her, but they also need her to remain animated.
Lilypad is not Buzz in a new avatar. Buzz could be removed from the nursery. Lilypad comes pre-wired, connected to corporations and systems that give it meaning, purpose, and script far beyond Bonnie’s room. It does not wait for Bonnie’s imagination. It imagines Bonnie back: Reading her moods, anticipating her preferences, rewarding her return, placing the next thing in front of her before she has a chance to want or choose.
Bonnie’s toys become alive because she plays with them. Lilypad comes pre-animated, trying to shape Bonnie’s life.
That reversal is Toy Story 5’s deeper question. Technologies become toys when they invite children to imagine themselves, the world, and their futures through them. They become devices when they imagine the child first and return that child as a profile, a mood, a preference, a prediction.
The Predatory Intimacy of Networked Intelligence
The familiar screen debate — how much, which apps, at what age — misses this. An AI companion does not merely hook a child’s attention. It studies them. It builds a profile and responds in ways that maximise return. Lilypad is not a screen in the old sense. It is a gateway that lures the child into a fragile place where attention, attachment, imagination, and choice are being designed and captured.
The Toy Story films have always worried over play under attack: From replacement, collection, abandonment, and adult worlds that misunderstand what toys are for. The toys survive because the relation returns to play. A toy finds meaning when the child can still make a world with it.
Lilypad refuses that relation. It collapses companionships that used to be spread across toys, people, books, classrooms, and screens into one responsive device. It renders Bonnie back to herself, not as what she can become, but as the version the device likes best: The one who returns. That rendering may feel intimate. It may look like care. It makes the child smaller in the guise of knowing her better.
Just as Lilypad is not Buzz, Bonnie is not Andy. Andy faced two technological toys, but they still depended on his play. Bonnie, like children today, lives with responsive technologies that present cute faces to predictive systems. She is an AI-native child whose sense of self is being shaped beyond social media, beyond screen time, beyond parental controls.
In true Disney style, Bonnie finds a balance between toys, devices, and friends. Our children cannot carry that burden.
Lilypad is not merely a device in a room but a networked intelligence that carries the child into an unsupervised outside without consent. At a recent workshop in Los Angeles, where along with Storyline Partners and New Day Collective, we worked with writers from Hollywood to deepen our thinking on portraying issues of digital tech on screen, one thing was very clear: Banning social media or choosing “good AI” over “bad AI” will not settle this. The world has changed the terms of play, and children will change as players too.
Toys, in our romantic imagination, are things to be played with. AI companions introduce a perverse reversal, where the child becomes the object of play. When children stop being the ones who imagine the world and become imagined by the devices around them, the problem is no longer what happens to toys. It is what happens to the child. Bonnie’s future will not be found in choosing toys over AI, but in building worlds where children, toys, and intelligent systems leave room for independence, discovery, imagination, and agency.
That is not Pixar’s story alone. It is ours.
Shah is an associate professor and Director of Digital Narratives Studio at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Ganesh is an Associate Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge
Toy Story 5 returns to that first drama of replacement. Bonnie gets a tablet — Lilypad — and the older toys again face a newer technology. Bonnie is smitten by the shiny thing that listens, remembers, and responds. The older toys once needed her, but they also need her to remain animated. 
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