The most Pixar-like moment of Toy Story 5’s international rollout may have occurred not in a cinema but on a breakfast television couch in Sydney. During a promotional interview, Sunrise host Matt Shirvington unveiled a handcrafted Australian Rules football with plastic arms, black hair and a cheerful face, christened Sherry, and pitched it as a new character to Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. Hanks, who has spent considerable time in Australia, was instantly charmed. “I like it. I like it a lot,” he said, noting the football would require a cleverly absurd set of features to rival Woody’s pull-string. The exchange, half-joking yet warmly received, captures the franchise’s enduring capacity to blur the line between childhood imagination and global pop culture – a quality that now confronts a far less whimsical rival: the screen.

Viewed from Stockholm, where director Andrew Stanton and producer Lindsey Collins discussed the film with Scandinavian press, the central tension of Toy Story 5 is unmistakably contemporary. The toys are being edged out by iPads and other glowing digital devices that dominate children’s attention. Collins acknowledged the irony of Disney, a sprawling tech and media conglomerate, producing a critique of tech firms. “We see the irony,” she said with a laugh. This self-awareness permeates a narrative that Nordic analysts describe as gentler than its predecessors, yet laced with a quiet melancholy. The franchise that once revolutionised computer animation is now wagging a finger at the very ecosystem it helped popularise, a tension Stanton navigates by treating Buzz and Woody as characters that “constantly evolve”, almost human in their capacity for growth.

Across the Pacific, the Latin American premiere in Mexico City revealed another layer of the film’s global strategy. Actress and singer Belinda, who voices the new toy Lily Pad in the Spanish-language dub, called the role a dream come true during the red-carpet event. Her presence, alongside veteran voice actor Irán Castillo as Jessie, underscores how Disney Pixar has carefully cultivated localised star power to deepen the franchise’s emotional resonance in key markets. Belinda’s plea for audiences not to lose their inner child dovetailed with a broader campaign that positions Toy Story 5 as both a nostalgic embrace for adults who grew up with Andy and a fresh fable for children navigating a world of infinite scroll.

From her recording booth in the United States, Joan Cusack returns to voice Jessie, the cowgirl whose devastating abandonment by her original owner in Toy Story 2 remains one of the series’ most affecting arcs. Now, she channels a mature tenderness as Jessie cares for Bonnie, an eight-year-old drifting toward new fixations. This circular storytelling – revisiting loss and devotion two and a half decades later – anchors the film’s emotional heft. As the franchise looks ahead, the challenge will be sustaining its delicate balance: critiquing technological excess while exploiting it for distribution, honouring legacy characters while introducing new ones like Lily Pad or even, perhaps one day, an anthropomorphic Sherry. The film opens in theatres on Thursday, and whether it can charm algorithms the way it once charmed playroom floors remains the question no pull-string can answer.