Toy Story 5 director reveals why he made his first Pixar movie in 10 years

For Toy Story 5, the director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E tells Polygon he finally agreed to take the helm of Pixar's most iconic franchise for one simple reason:

"Somebody might fuck it up."

Well, maybe that's not the only reason. When I get on a Zoom with Stanton to talk about Toy Story 5 for Polygon's 2026 Summer Preview, the first thing I ask is why he agreed to direct his first Pixar movie since 2016's Finding Dory. His answer is long enough (and fascinating enough) to take up this entire article.

In a quick 15-minute interview, he also explains why he chose to tell a story about technology (the plot revolves the toys' current kid Bonnie getting a tablet named Lilypad that threatens to replace them), recasting iconic voices like Mr. Potato Head after the death of Don Rickles, and the future of Pixar. Check out the full interview below.

Polygon: You've worked on a lot of Pixar movies of the years, but you've never directed a Toy Story movie until now. What was the motivation to do this one?

Andrew Stanton: There's no simple answer to this. I was asked, and it wasn't on my radar. And then, if I'm being really frank, I was like, "Ugh, somebody might fuck it up," and I would hate to see it done wrong. I've always been a writer or involved in the writing of the other Toy Story movies. I said, "Let me just write our first draft of what I would like to see." And if we agree that where I've pointed to is the same place you'd like to go to — this was to Pete Docter and to Jim Morris to Jonas Rivera and Bob Iger — then maybe we can do this. Because you have to really love the idea to live with it for four years and deal with all the highs and lows.

So I spent the summer and I wrote what is basically the foundation of Toy Story 5. I just wrote what I wished I could see, where I'd love to spend time, and what issues I'd love to delve into, both personal and character-wise and plot-wise. I didn't lie to myself that I had it solved, but I just said, "Here's where I would dig." And they liked it.

My next big agenda was: I don't want to do this alone. I never enjoyed making these movies by myself. I learned how to make a Pixar movie on a team. I was part of a band. So I always want to write opposite somebody. I always want a co-director. It's like a deputy to the sheriff, which is what my role was to John [Lassetter]. You just make smarter ideas. It's less lonely. You make less mistakes. And the thrill of making a movie is not that you have some vision and everybody executes it. That's a lie. It's the playing in a band that is the thrill. If I can get the band right, then I will enjoy the journey because we'll make something greater than we could if we were alone. That's always been the case. I think the auteur theory is bullshit. You don't make something on your own. You make it because of the specific names of: Who's your cinematographer? Who's your DP? Who's your art director? Who's your script writer?

So the first thing I did was, I got this person that was 30 years younger than me, who had been born when the first Toy Story [came out], named McKenna Harris. They seemed to have such great ideas when I was in a think tank room with them once about what other Toy Story movies could be. We were finishing each other's sentences. They had a very different perspective of growing up with the Toy Story movies and growing up in a different era than I did. I was 26 when I worked on Toy Story and 30 when I finished. So I told them, "You're not too young. You're at the perfect age." So it turned out to be a match made in heaven because we became equal writers right away. They became a great sort of Jimmy Cricket to my Pinocchio, giving me the right advice or telling me, Don't go that way, do go this way.

And then the final thing was: I didn't think I was going to make another Pixar movie. I knew I was always going to be an advisor and help everybody else, which is what I've done for a long time. But then I thought, This is how I can teach the intangible stuff. I didn't know how much I knew — specifically how much I knew about how to make a movie at Pixar — until I was doing it again and purposely sharing that knowledge with, not just my co-director, but with my entire team, which many of them had only come to Pixar in the last 10 or 15 years. I know that these Toy Story movies will keep going one way or another. They're too valuable. So I wanted to improve the odds that they'll get done right and the best way I could do was teach by example.

The plot ofToy Story 5centers around the kid, Bonnie, getting a tablet, and the toys having to compete with technology for her attention. You've said before you don't just want tomake tech the villain of the movie. So how are you framing technology in this film?

We're just trying to lean into the truth of childhood today, same with all the other Toy Story movies. Parents and kids are both struggling with the positives of devices. They wouldn't be glued to them if there wasn't the attraction of it, and parents wouldn't be allowing it if they didn't think something was helpful about it. There's also a fear of leaving your kids behind while the other kids are doing the same thing. So we're trying to just navigate it in the ugly, messy way that real life is navigated.

The thing that was really eye-opening for us is not so much trying to make a statement as to just showing the truth of these toys. What do they want to do? They want to help the child grow and thrive. Well, so do the devices, but they just have very different attitudes about how they think it should happen. It didn't click until we cracked Lilypad as, Oh, it's a helicopter parent who's also your personal assistant.

And this is all at this key moment for a child that we haven't addressed in any of the other movies before, which is when you decide to socially expand beyond your own little safety of your world and try to make friends, which is risky. It's like asking somebody out on a date. If you get made fun of or denied, it can stunt you character-wise for the rest of life. It's traumatic. We all remember how high-stakes it was to try to make a friend, whether it was across the street, at a new school, in a new class. When you're that young, when you're eight, it is everything. As far as the toys and devices are concerned, they are equally in agreement that the stakes are that high.

That's the beauty of the Toy Story movies continuing. We hand it off to another kid who has a different trajectory, a different childhood, a different household. And yet there's universal things that happen with a kid we can all connect with.

Can you talk about some of the recasting in this movie? A few core actors from the previous films have passed away since Toy Story 4 — Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head, Estelle Harris as Mrs. Potato Head, and Carl Weathers as Combat Carl. How did you find their replacements?

It's the trouble with every franchise that goes on longer than people's lifespans, and it's going to be ongoing how people figure it out.

It was different with every character. You had Estelle Harris and Don Rickles pass away, and we said, "Well, we start with the obvious. Does anybody sound like them?" There was a hot minute where we thought, Wouldn't it be funny if they lost their lips and they found some used lips and we just put in new voices? That was funny to us, but the minute we tried to do it, we had to stop the film to address it. So we couldn't use that. But we were shocked when we found the character voices: Jeff Bergman and Anna Vocino, they sounded exactly like them

Ernie Hudson also sounded amazingly like Carl Weathers. We were shocked. And Ernie Hudson is buff. Oh my God, he's 80 and he's got guns bigger than anything I could ever imagine. I thought he was 60 because he was in such great shape.

I'm going to zoom out a bit for my last question: It's been an interesting few years for Pixar with lots of ups and downs. What's the future of the studio? How do you keep pushing boundaries and telling original stories and finding new audiences?

There isn't some big plan that I know of. We evolved from a singular director making a singular movie to other movies by just investing in new talent and seeing what stories they wanted to tell and kind of stumbled through the mess of figuring that out as we expanded. We never stopped doing that. As you've seen with Daniel Chong [Hoppers] and Domee Shi [Turning Red, Elio], and other up-and-coming names like Carrie Hobson and Michael Yates, we're finding talent whose voices are as interesting as the voices that we started the company with. Because that's the only thing we know is to capitalize on the talent that we have and the chemistry that comes from them working together.

And then the sequel thing's always been part of us. Our third movie was a sequel. We've always been in the economic struggle of, we can't survive unless we make an occasional sequel so that we can make originals, but we don't want to make anything inferior. So we kill ourselves trying to make sure that the sequels are something we would want to watch. That's been the ethos since 1997, when we started on Toy Story 2, and that fundamentally has never changed. The fact that we're still here to talk about it is proof that strategy works. Thank God we're still here because of it. There's a lot of movies you've benefited from only because we had bigger hits.

Toy Story 5 releases in theaters on June 19, 2026.