- Toy Story 5 doesn’t star Woody and Buzz as its lead characters
- Jessie is the movie’s primary toy-based protagonist
- Its co-writer/director says he didn’t intentionally plan for that to happen
The co-writer and director of Toy Story 5 has revealed he “never planned” for Jessie to replace Woody and Buzz as its main character.
In an exclusive chat with TechRadar, Andrew Stanton admitted he didn’t approach the new Pixar movie’s story with that aim in mind. However, as he and fellow writer Kenna Harris brainstormed ideas for the fifth entry in the Toy Story franchise, it became clear that Jessie, rather than Buzz and Woody, had to be the film’s focal point.
Indeed, as Stanton explained, discussions about what a fifth Toy Story movie could be started three years after the film series’ most recent installment, 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, on his own and, later, with Harris — that he began to fully visualize Toy Story 5‘s ‘toys meet tech’ narrative, and its adjacent themes of screen addiction, childhood loneliness in the digital age, and toy-based obsolescence.
The last of those storytelling topics was key to unlocking Jessie’s leading role in one of 2026’s most anticipated new movies. Until now, fans had only been given a glimpse into Jessie’s past life via Toy Story 2, which revealed she had been owned by a girl called Emily before being abandoned at the side of a road in a donation box when Emily outgrew her. Ultimately, it was filling in the gaps of this decades-long mystery that helped Stanton and Harris to not only build Toy Story 5‘s plot around Jessie, but make her its central character.
“We never planned that,” Stanton told me of establishing Jessie as the film’s lead. “Basically, I was asked in 2022 if I’d be interested in making Toy Story 5 and I said ‘what’s the idea?’. I was told nobody had one, so I said ‘well, I know these films take years to make, so it has to 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 one ingredient I definitely wanted to deal with. I also knew I wanted to do something on devices, which had been around for a few years at the time, and where getting into the hands of younger and younger kids. Later, I had the idea of wanting to see 50 Buzz Lightyears in a multi-linked way, which ties into the movie’s tech theme, but in a good way. Mix all of that together and we had the elements to form our movie around.”
Toy Story 5 will launch 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 film without Woody, Buzz, and Jessie just yet.
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