Toy Story is not only a landmark achievement in film history but is also often regarded as one of the best animated films of all time. An incredibly witty script filled with fantastic characters and thoughtful worldbuilding, the first Toy Story is a masterclass in efficient screenwriting. However, for 31 years, one question has been on everyone’s mind regarding everyone’s favorite space ranger, Buzz Lightyear.
One of the main jokes in Toy Story is that Buzz Lightyear, wonderfully voiced by Tim Allen, does not know he is a toy. He thinks he is a space ranger, the real Buzz Lightyear. His arc is about discovering the truth of his identity and accepting that he is a toy. Yet if that is the case, why does Buzz Lightyear freeze when a human is present? Wouldn’t he move forward with his mission? For years, it has been a plot hole, but an acceptable one because it doesn’t derail Toy Story’s plot or its thematic resonances. Yet after 31 years, Pixar offers a fun wink at the supposed plot hole in Toy Story 5.
‘Toy Story 5’ Acknowledges the 31-Year-Old Plot Hole (But Doesn’t Try to Fix It)
Toy Story 5 begins with a group of new, upgraded Buzz Lightyear figures walking up on a deserted island after a cargo container holding them washed ashore. The Buzzs look up at the night sky and see the North Star, identifying it as Star Command and setting out to reach their destination. They build a raft and find a way back to land, where they end up in a shipping yard and continue north. The 50 or so Buzz Lightyears are running, but then, when a dockworker begins to walk up, all of them collapse to the ground and assume their inactive toy mode.
When the dockworker leaves, all the Buzzes get up and look at one another. One asks, “Why did we freeze?” To which another replies, “Fascinating.” The scene quickly moves on and is never really addressed again. Even though Toy Story 5 does not provide an exact answer for the issue, it is clear they are aware of the observation and have decided to address it in a fittingly playful way.
In many ways, Toy Story 5‘s tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of why Buzz Lightyear thinks he was a real space ranger but still behaves like a toy is similar to the final joke at the end of Toy Story 4. In that film, a big question hanging over the story is how Forky, a spork turned toy by Bonnie, gained sentience. The movie quickly moved on from that question, but in Toy Story 4‘s final mid-credit scene, when Forky meets his future wife Karen Beverly, she asks him, “How am I alive?” to which Forky replies, “I don’t know.”
With both the Buzz dilemma and the question of how or what makes toys come to life, Pixar is having fun acknowledging fans’ questions while never giving answers. Because at the end of the day, the answers are not important.
‘Toy Story’ is About “What If” Toys Were Alive, Not The “How”
From all five Toy Story films, audiences can certainly make their own assumption of why Buzz Lightyear behaves like a toy when he thinks he is human. Is it space ranger training? Does he perceive himself as being on a planet run by giants, and is it a survival mode? Is it an involuntary movement that toys can’t fully control? There are plenty of ideas, but no explanation would actually improve on Toy Story or make for a better movie.
This is something that Pixar knows. Toy Story is about “what if toys were alive” and not how they are alive. The “how” is irrelevant because that is not the interesting part of Toy Story. In 2020, Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter even acknowledged this, saying, when they were developing Toy Story:
“We went through a lot of discussion on Toy Story, the first one, about like, ‘If Buzz doesn’t know he’s a toy, why does he go rigid when a kid walks in the room?’ We had a lot of explanations and talk about that, too. And in the end, nobody cared.”
Famed comic writer Grant Morrison summed up the difference between how adults and children approach media in their novel Supergods, and while it was related to superheroes, it also applies to Toy Story.
“A child can accept all kinds of weird-looking creatures and bizarre occurrences in a story because the child understands that stories have different rules that allow for pretty much anything to happen. Adults, on the other hand, struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it’s not real.”
- Release Date
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June 19, 2026
- Runtime
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102 Minutes
- Producers
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Lindsey Collins, Jessica Choi
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
