Toy Story 5 stopped production for two weeks so Pixar could rewrite its first act, co-director Kenna Harris said on October 16, and the rewrite put Bonnie’s loneliness at the center of the story.
“We stopped production for two weeks, and focused on the film’s core issue at the time,” Harris said at View Conference in Turin. “Our act one was not working.” The first week went to figuring out what was wrong. In the second, Harris and director Andrew Stanton rewrote it.
What Changed In Toy Story 5
In the early version, Jessie mostly wanted her playtime with Bonnie back, especially after the two were separated during a dance class. Early screenings showed audiences were unmoved by a conflict that echoed the first film’s fight for a kid’s attention. “The stakes of losing playtime felt too soft,” Harris said.
The fix was to make Bonnie’s loneliness the heart of the movie. Instead of chasing playtime, Jessie sets out to help the shy girl make a real friend, and Blaze moved from the edges of the adventure to the middle of it. “This was the moment that turned an okay movie into a good one,” Harris said, and reactions at internal screenings got noticeably better.
The filmmakers also had to figure out Lilypad, the tablet pulling Bonnie away from her toys. Harris did not want it to be simply evil, because the movie needed to admit how hard it is for kids and adults alike to put technology down.
The Ending Pixar Left Behind
The ending changed too. One discarded version had Jessie meeting an elderly Emily, her original owner, at Emily’s old home. Harris felt it wrapped up Jessie’s pain too neatly, so the finished film goes back to the tire-swing tree from Toy Story 2 and builds a quieter finale around a time capsule. After seeing that version at a screening, Harris remembered thinking, “There’s no way we’re changing it.” We covered an Emily ending from The Art of Toy Story 5 back in June.
Making Jessie the lead was its own gamble. “Part of the risk of this film was having Jessie as the protagonist,” Harris said, recalling questions about whether audiences would rather watch Woody and Buzz. They stayed important, but Jessie’s history is what gave the sequel its purpose.
From Jessie Fan To Co-Director
Harris grew up drawing Jessie and copying details from Toy Story 2. Stanton offered the co-director job in late 2022, after Harris had worked on Luca, Ciao Alberto and Inside Out 2. Harris said yes, then asked to co-write the screenplay without ever having written a feature, and ended up sharing the screenwriting credit with Stanton.
Harris also pushed for Jessie and Buzz to kiss in the middle of a dangerous action sequence, and Stanton agreed. An image of Jessie riding a real horse helped lead to the ranch setting and to Blaze, and the team visited BreyerFest, a Kentucky convention devoted to model horses, for research. The imagination sequences got a looser, more painterly look than Pixar usually goes for, worked out in quick experiments the crew called “playtime weeklies.”
Toy Story 5 opened in theaters on June 19 and has been streaming on Disney+ since September 23.
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