TOY STORY 5 Director Andrew Stanton Talks About the Future of the Franchise

Toy Story 5 is headed our way in just over a month, and despite some skepticism from those who believed the franchise should have ended with the third film, it looks like we are going to have another fun adventure with our favorite onscreen toys.

The trilogy felt complete, as the story started with Andy, a kid who loved to play with his toys until the third film, where he was grown up and headed to college, and he found another child to pass his toys onto for further adventures.

But as the fourth film revealed, toys remain the same over time, and if they’re taken care of, they can go on to withstand many kids and variety of iterations. Now, as the world has changed from kids with toys to kids with electronics, this next film will give us a peek into what that means for our pint-sized heroes.

Director Andrew Stanton talked about the evolution of the franchise and where it’s headed in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Stanton explained that he owes "everything in my career to the first movie and the skills that I've learned."

But the older he's gotten, the more he's realized "nobody's flying the plane" — meaning, nobody had a great master plan for where these stories would go. But after hundreds of millions at the box office, people were still connecting with Woody, Buzz, and the gang. 

"There's a way of looking at Toy Story [as it] was made out of a business decision: How do we make a movie that's all computer graphics?" Stanton says. "How do we marry it with an idea that you'd wanna see regardless? That's the show business of it all. We just want to make sure that the show is the driver of the show business."

It happened with Toy Story 3 (2010) when someone in the room asked: What if Andy, the franchise's original child, went off to college? "Everybody laughed," Stanton recalls. "And then there was a long pause, and we said, 'No, seriously. What if we did that?' What broke my brain was that we can embrace time. Other stories don’t have that luxury."

It came again with Toy Story 4. Stanton was brought in to consult at a time, he says, when the creatives were falling victim to "spectaculitis" (i.e., wanting to make a spectacle). He pitched a redo of the opener:

"Let's have something really simple that shocks the perspective of the audience member to go, 'If I were a toy, that would be tragic.'" From that came the nine-year flashback to when Andy left a toy behind outside in the rain. "Any other movie, that's boring, but [for] that movie, that's high stakes," he says. 

The idea for Toy Story 5 was similar. Hanks thought 4 was "the actual perfect place to end the saga," but Stanton's approach felt like "vintage Toy Story without having to reboot toys," the actor says. 

Stanton feels that, with just two months of brainstorming the mundane elements of the lifecycle of a toy, there would be two movies' worth of Toy Story material to explore next. Maybe not with Bonnie, but a different character as a focal point. "That's why I feel like it can keep going," he says, even if it's not with him at the helm. 

Stanton foresees he'll, at the very least, be asked to advise on Pixar films until he's "in a rocking chair somewhere. And I will always have a strong opinion about this." To him, "This is probably the best way I can leave my stamp at Pixar — teaching others how this is done."

By this film, I think we can all agree that the creators take a lot of pride in this franchise, and they know how to tell a great story. I am looking forward to seeing how the fifth film turns out.

Toy Story 5 is set to hit theaters everywhere on June 19th.