No one forgets their favourite toy. Even megastars Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, the voices behind Toy Story’s famous duo Woody and Buzz, have fond memories of a particular plaything they rarely went anywhere without.
“I can remember being completely content, serene and happy when it was just me and my army men, or me and my car,” Hanks, the two-time Academy Award-winner who voices cowboy sheriff Woody, tells this masthead ahead of the release of Toy Story 5. “The world was mine, time stood still.”
It’s these kinds of memories, whether old or new, that have kept the Toy Story franchise alive for more than 30 years. Pixar released the first film in 1995, moving audiences to tears with a story about a boy and his two favourite, duelling toys. After all, there are few things more precious than the connection between a child and their favourite plaything.
Now, five movies later, the franchise is just as popular as ever: Toy Story 4 surpassed $US1 billion at the global box office in 2019, and both the third and fourth films won the Oscar for best animated feature.
Toy Story 5, set to land in theatres on July 18, aims to recreate this success but this time tech has come to play. Woody (Hanks), Buzz (Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack) and the rest of the gang reunite to save their owner Bonnie from falling victim to the dreaded “Lilypad”, an addictive iPad-type device that threatens to separate children from their beloved physical toys.
Despite being the fifth film in a 30-year-old series, Hanks says it contains one of the most heartbreaking scenes to date. According to him, the franchise’s ability to consistently pull on our heartstrings always comes back to that undeniable child-toy connection.
“Every single one of us has a deep, unspoken yet deeply felt connection to when we were children, and the connection we had with our toys,” he says.
I recall losing my favourite toy in a shopping mall when I was eight-years-old. His name was Sammy, he was a multicoloured polar bear and he was my world. So when I realised I’d dropped him somewhere inside a massive mall thronging with shoppers, I thought the universe would literally crash down around me. After hours of searching we finally discovered him propped up near an escalator. I burst into tears and vowed I’d never lose him again. I never did – to this day he sits in my wardrobe.
Those moments eventually disappear as we age, Hanks says, but we never stop yearning for “that world, that connection, that place where we were never confused and were totally in control”.
It’s this feeling we all innately have that draws people, both young and old, to Toy Story. “I don’t know how [Pixar] does it. I’m just glad they do it with us,” Hanks says, turning to his co-star Allen, who voices space commander Buzz Lightyear.
Just as I had Sammy, both Hanks and Allen had their own favourite toys while growing up. For Hanks it was his Major Matt Mason, a ’60s action figure that he made mini-movies with, and his Lincoln Logs, a log construction toy popular in the US.
While Hanks was building things, Allen was destroying them. The toy he remembers most fondly may not have been “politically correct”, he says, but he adored it nevertheless.
“I got a Daisy Pump BB gun and I took it everywhere with me. Safety first – I never shot anyone with it, except my neighbour’s windows,” Allen says.
“[My neighbour] came to my mother and said, ‘Somebody’s shooting the windows in my porch.’ My mother yelled, ‘Tim, get down here.’ Of course, men are stupid – I’m carrying the weapon with me, still smoking. I go, ‘What?’ She says, ‘You’re shooting all the windows out of her porch.’ And I said, ‘Well, not all of them. I couldn’t hit the north side from up here. I’d have to get on the garage to shoot that.’”
Our specific experiences with toys may differ but the heart of it does not. It’s because of this that Toy Story filmmaker Andrew Stanton suggests the franchise could continue well into the future, even if there aren’t any set plans for now.
“Pixar [is] able to take that emotion and bring it to life by way of this now-sacred version of animation that never ceases to dazzle us on a visual level, and never ceases to touch us on an emotional one,” Hanks says.
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Nell Geraets is a Culture reporter at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.
