OPINION — The reviews of “Toy Story 5” have settled into a comfortable consensus: It’s a movie about children and digital screens, and about the parents who worry over them.
Director and co-writer Andrew Stanton has said as much, describing the film’s central crisis as the fact that “nobody’s really playing” anymore. The tears in theaters, the BBC declared, belong to parents watching a child’s loneliness unfold.
That lets the grown-ups off too easily. Watch the film again and notice who is actually holding the device. Bonnie clutches her Lilypad tablet “like a comforting blanket,” zoning out on a mindless game while her old toys sit abandoned in a corner. Swap the tablet for a phone, and Bonnie is not just a warning about our children, she is a portrait of us.
