Thirty-one years after a cowboy first panicked over being replaced, Pixar can still find the ache under the plastic. The best sequence in Toy Story 5 has no chase, no rescue, no cliff-hanging peril. Bonnie, the shy eight-year-old who inherited Woody and the gang, slips into a game only she can see, and the movie slips in after her. The animation turns to pastel chalk and construction-paper edges, as if the inside of a child’s mind had been spread across the carpet. It is tender, funny, and utterly sure of what it reveres: the strange, serious work of a kid making her own fun. Director Andrew Stanton, who has been with these toys since the beginning, and co-director McKenna Harris know exactly where the magic lives, and the film is at its best whenever it goes back for it.

Its affections are in the right place. The premise is toy versus tech, and it holds that nerve almost the whole way through. When Bonnie carries her red-braided cowgirl Jessie over to the neighborhood kids, hoping to play, they scatter; a beat later she watches those same children go slack-faced over their screens. Her anxious parents, desperate to buy her a seat at the cool table, hand her a frog-shaped tablet named Lilypad. It charms, soothes, flatters, and quietly supplants, until Bonnie is hooked........

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