The Final ‘Toy Story 5’ Trailer Shows Pixar Isn't Afraid to Let Woody Get Old

Andrew Stanton returns as director and sole screenwriter to build a villain out of the one thing a toy can’t compete with: a screen.

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Summary

  • The final Toy Story 5 trailer reveals a visibly aged Woody — balding, poncho-clad, and sporting a beer gut — reuniting with Buzz to protect Bonnie’s imagination.
  • The film’s central antagonist is Lilypad, a frog-shaped smart tablet voiced by Greta Lee, framed less as a villain and more as a structural threat to the idea of play itself.
  • Toy Story 5 opens exclusively in theaters on June 19, directed by Andrew Stanton and co-directed by Kenna Harris

Disney and Pixar have released the final trailer for Toy Story 5, arriving in theaters June 19. Directed by Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote all four previous installments and returns here as sole screenwriter, the film reunites Tom Hanks and Tim Allen as Woody and Buzz Lightyear, this time facing a threat the toy box has never had to reckon with: technology designed to replace imagination entirely.

The trailer’s most deliberate creative choice is how openly it leans into Woody’s physical deterioration. A bald spot, a beer gut, a red poncho — the other toys don’t let it slide, landing jokes at his expense before the stakes come into focus. It is a meaningful decision for a franchise built on the fear of being outgrown. Where previous films externalized that anxiety through new toys, new owners, and broken relationships, Toy Story 5 internalizes it. Woody is no longer just at risk of being replaced. He is visibly, irreversibly aging.

The antagonist this time is Lilypad, a high-tech frog-shaped smart tablet voiced by Greta Lee, whose threat operates on a systemic level rather than a personal one. Stanton has been explicit that Lilypad is not a villain in the traditional sense. She is a product, functioning exactly as designed. The conflict is not good versus evil but analog versus digital, and the film appears to understand that framing a child’s tablet as a straightforward bad guy would undercut everything it is trying to say. Conan O’Brien joins as Smarty Pants, Bad Bunny voices a pizza with sunglasses, and Alan Cumming appears as Evil Bullseye, Bullseye’s playtime alter ego, rounding out new additions that suggest the film is willing to be weirder than its predecessors.

Stanton’s fingerprints are all over the structural logic here. The director of Finding Nemo, WALL-E, and Finding Dory has built his filmmaking language around protagonists who are fundamentally out of place in the world they inhabit. Woody, a pull-string cowboy in a tablet-first childhood, fits that template precisely. The question Toy Story 5 seems to be asking is not whether toys can win against technology, but whether the things they represent can survive at all.

Toy Story 5 opens in theaters on June 19.

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