Toy Story 5 Ventures Into New Animated Territory With An Imaginative Playtime Sequence – SlashFilm

As Pixar’s first feature-length animated movie, “Toy Story” became the backbone of the animation studio. In addition to becoming their first franchise, the animation in that original movie had a large influence on Pixar’s in-house style. Of course, as computer animation evolved to become more sophisticated, so did the visual style. It was only in recent years that Pixar started to experiment with more varied animation style, as evidenced by movies like “Luca” and “Turning Red.” Plus, their upcoming “Gatto” looks to be on another level entirely when it comes to the production design. However, “Toy Story 5” offers a taste of something drastically different for Pixar, and it comes from Bonnie’s imagination.

In the first “Toy Story,” Andy’s imagination isn’t shown in a stylish way. Instead, we watch as Andy provides voices for his various toys, playing out an imaginary bank hold-up in the Wild West. But in “Toy Story 3,” Andy’s imagination is depicted as being a cinematic version of the real world as it appears the Pixar franchise. Fans will recall that one of Andy’s playtime sessions involved a Western-inspired chase with Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack), and more of Andy’s toys on a speeding locomotive, culminating in a sci-fi mash-up featuring a giant spaceship version of the piggy bank Hamm (John Ratzenberger). It was an action-packed scene with several callbacks to the first fun sequence in “Toy Story,” but “Toy Story 5” has a much different way of showing playtime.

As glimpsed in the “Toy Story 5” trailer, Bonnie’s imagination is represented with an animation style unlike anything Pixar has done before, and it created a unique hurdle for the animation studio to overcome.

If you look at the “Toy Story 5” trailer, you’ll notice that there are scenes where Jessie and the toys that now belong to Bonnie are in an environment that looks like a child’s crayon drawing. This is how Bonnie’s imagination is depicted in the movie, and even the characters are given a different animation texture to seamlessly blend in with how Bonnie imagines them in her head. 

During an early press day where myself and other reporters watched the first half of “Toy Story 5,” production designer Bob Pauley explained to us:

“Bonnie is different. She’s crafty and creative and so we thought maybe it should reflect some of that. So we looked at a lot of different reference images, paintings and so forth. Carlos [Felipe León Ortiz], our lighting art director, did some paintings, and we saw those and went, ‘Wait a second. That’s really cool.’ So then it was kind of targeting and kind of getting a little closer to what that is on-screen.”

Visual effects supervisor Thomas Jordan echoed those sentiments:

“We’ve never had the look of a ‘Toy Story’ movie be that different than what we’ve seen before, and we didn’t know what that needed to be when we decided we wanted it. So it took a lot of trial and error and brainstorming and story pitches to figure out this is what Bonnie’s imagination looks like. It looks like something she made with her own hands, arts and crafts. She directed her own school play that’s very over the top and melodramatic, and it looks like maybe it’s made with paper and pens and chalk, and it doesn’t look computer generated. That’s the biggest challenge of all, using a computer to make something that doesn’t look like it was made with a computer.”

You’ll also notice that the design doesn’t actually become a 2D kind of animation, but it’s a mix of what you might see on a kid’s sheet of paper along with Pixar’s traditional 3D animation. Pauley said:

“We didn’t want to do flat. We didn’t want to go from a 3D to a 2D. So we still want to have depth to it. So how do we do that depth with kind of a painterly fashion that isn’t distracting but feels kind of magical and a playtime, maybe there’s vignetting that kind of goes out of focus and it’s got a lightness to it. And so it was a process. It was a really fun interactive process with technical teams because it’s outside of our pipeline. We wouldn’t usually do it this way. So it was a good challenge.”

Thankfully, it’s not the only sequence where we’ll see her imagination come to life. During out interview, Bob Pauley teased another scene later in the movie in this same style, and Disney added another interesting wrinkle to that second imagination sequence by announcing that Alan Cumming (“X2: X-Men United”) will lend his voice to Evil Bullseye, a playtime alter ego to Jessie’s trusty steed (though the regular Bullseye still doesn’t speak). 

For those excited about Pixar’s upcoming “Gatto,” these sequences for Bonnie’s imagination feel like a nice gateway to Pixar trying something even more different visually. Though Pauley said that the animators on these sequences and “Gatto” didn’t exactly work hand-in-hand, he did say:

“I got to say, that’s one of the exciting things is that this is a different look in these kind of play times, and so is ‘Gatto.’ It’s a much different look. So it’s really kind of exciting to see us go this direction.”

“Toy Story 5” hits theaters on June 19, 2026.