- Toy Story 5 does not feature Woody and Buzz as main characters
- Jessie is the main protagonist of the film based on the toys.
- His co-writer/director says he didn’t intentionally plan for this to happen
The co-writer and director of Toy Story 5 revealed that he “never planned” for Jessie to replace Woody and Buzz as the main character.
In an exclusive conversation with TechRadar, Andrew Stanton admitted that he didn’t approach the story of the new Pixar film with that goal in mind. However, as he and colleague Kenna Harris brainstormed ideas for the fifth entry in the Toy story franchise, it became clear that Jessie, rather than Buzz and Woody, needed to be the focal point of the film.
Indeed, as Stanton explains, discussions about what a fifth is Toy story the film could begin three years after the last installment of the film series, aka Toy Story 4. At the time, he, nor anyone at Pixar or parent company Disney, had a specific story idea in mind for what they and/or audiences would want to see.
It wasn’t until Stanton sat down – first alone, then with Harris – that he began to fully visualize Toy Story 5The “toys meets technology” narrative and its adjacent themes of screen addiction, childhood loneliness in the digital age, and toy obsolescence.
The last of these storytelling topics was key to unlocking Jessie’s starring role in one of the most anticipated new films of 2026. Until now, fans had only gotten a glimpse of Jessie’s past life via Toy Story 2which revealed that it belonged to a girl called Emily before being abandoned on the side of a road in a donation box when Emily outgrew it. Ultimately, it was filling in the gaps in this decades-old mystery that helped Stanton and Harris not only build Toy Story 5the plot around Jessie, but make her its central character.
“We never planned this,” Stanton told me of casting Jessie as the film’s protagonist. “Basically, I was asked in 2022 if I was interested in doing Toy Story 5 and I said ‘what’s the idea?’. I was told no one had any, so I said, “Well, I know these movies take years to make, so it must be an idea I really like.” Let me write something and, if I like it enough, I’ll want to work on it.”
“But I knew Jessie’s past was always something I wanted to address,” he continued. “So that was an ingredient that I definitely wanted to tackle. I also knew that I wanted to do something about devices, which had been around for a few years at the time, and which were falling into the hands of younger and younger children. Later, I had the idea of wanting to see 50 Buzz Lightyears in a multi-related way, which tied into the technological theme of the film, but in a good way. Mix all of that together and we had the elements to form our film.”
Toy Story 5 will be released in theaters worldwide on Friday, June 19. For more exclusive coverage ahead of release, find out why Pixar has no plans to tell a Toy story movie without Woody, Buzz and Jessie for now.
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