Toy Story 4 (2019) Review: A Brave, Beautiful Farewell That Surprised Us All
- Joao Nsita
- Jun 18
- 13 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Opening Scene
When Toy Story 3 delivered its extraordinarily satisfying farewell to Andy's childhood in 2010, most of us assumed the franchise had said everything it needed to say. A fourth film felt unnecessary at best, and at worst a betrayal of one of cinema's most complete endings. And then Toy Story 4 arrived in cinemas on June 21, 2019 — directed by Josh Cooley, featuring Tom Hanks and Tim Allen alongside a remarkable new ensemble including Tony Hale, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks, and Jordan Peele — and did something no one expected: it made a compelling case for its own existence. This Toy Story 4 review is an attempt to understand how a film that nobody asked for became one of the most beautifully animated, thematically rich, and genuinely moving entries in the franchise. It is available on Disney+, it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and it is a far better film than it had any right to be.
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Plot Summary
Toy Story 4 begins with a flashback that recalibrates the franchise's emotional map: nine years before the main story, we see Woody (Tom Hanks) say goodbye to Bo Peep (Annie Potts), whose lamp is being donated. It is a quiet, heartbreaking little scene — Woody unable to leave Andy even for someone he loves — and it sets up everything that follows.
In the present, the toys are living with Bonnie, the young girl who inherited them at the end of Toy Story 3. Woody is no longer her favourite. He sits on the shelf while others are chosen, watching from a distance, his sheriff's star dimmed. When Bonnie faces her first day of kindergarten orientation with anxiety, Woody sneaks into her backpack and, through a series of improvisations, helps her create a toy from craft supplies — a spork with pipe-cleaner arms and a googly-eyed face named Forky (Tony Hale), who immediately becomes Bonnie's most beloved object.
The problem is that Forky — who genuinely believes himself to be trash rather than a toy — keeps trying to throw himself away. When the family takes a road-trip vacation, Woody and Forky end up separated from the group and find themselves in a small town with an antique shop, a vintage ventriloquist's dummy named Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks) who wants Woody's working voicebox, a pair of mischievous carnival plush toys named Ducky and Bunny (voiced with irresistible energy by Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key), and the stunt-motorcycle daredevil Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves, absolutely delightful).
Most importantly, Woody finds Bo Peep — changed, independent, free, and thriving without an owner. Their reunion becomes the film's beating heart and its central philosophical question: is a toy's purpose only fulfilled in belonging to a child, or can it be something larger than that?
Director's Style & Cinematic Elements
Josh Cooley's feature directorial debut is a visual triumph. Toy Story 4 is, shot for shot, the most beautifully animated entry in the franchise — and given the extraordinary standard of its predecessors, this is a significant statement. The antique shop sequences in particular achieve a level of photorealistic atmosphere that is genuinely jaw-dropping: dust motes in slanted afternoon light, the reflective depth of glass cabinets, the grain and texture of aged wood and worn fabric. There are moments in this film where you forget it is animated.
Cooley's direction demonstrates a confident spatial intelligence — the antique shop is rendered as a genuine world, with its own geography and light and shadow, and the camera moves through it with the curiosity and slight unease of exploring somewhere unfamiliar. The carnival sequences are lit with the warm, artificial glow of festive lights, creating a world that is beautiful and just slightly dreamlike.
The film's pacing is deliberate in a way that distinguishes it from its predecessors. Toy Story 4 is less interested in adventure set-pieces than in intimate character moments, and it gives those moments space to breathe. Some viewers find this slower register less propulsive than the earlier films; others — and this review is among them — find it the most emotionally mature approach the franchise has yet taken.
The score by Randy Newman continues, supplemented with a recurring use of "Gabby Gabby's Theme" that provides the film's more melancholy passages with a music-box delicacy that suits them perfectly.
Toy Story 4 holds a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and is detailed on IMDb.
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Themes & Deeper Meaning
The thematic ambition of Toy Story 4 is its most surprising quality, and it announces itself quietly in the film's central question: what is a toy for? The franchise has always assumed the answer — a toy exists to be loved by a child, and that love is what gives it purpose — but this film is brave enough to interrogate that assumption and find it insufficient.
Woody's arc in Toy Story 4 is the most personal in the franchise. He has defined himself entirely by his relationship to Andy, and then to Bonnie, and now — sitting on the shelf, unchosen — he faces the same question that any person faces when the identity they built their life around is taken away: who am I if not this? What is left of me when my purpose is removed?
Bo Peep provides the film's answer. She has been without an owner for years and has not diminished — she has expanded. She is more capable, more alive, more herself than she ever was in Andy's room. She represents a vision of purpose that is not contingent on being needed — one that comes from within rather than being bestowed.
Gabby Gabby is the film's most profound creation — a villain whose motivation is so legible and sympathetic that she functions as something closer to a tragic figure. She has spent years in the antique shop believing that she is unchosen because she is broken. The film's treatment of her storyline — and the sequence in which she finally reaches a child, only to be set aside again — is among the most honest and affecting things Pixar has ever done with the concept of rejection and resilience.
Forky's philosophical crisis — "I am trash!" — is played for comedy but carries a genuine charge. The film uses his character to ask, with disarming lightness, what makes anything valuable: not its material composition, but the love directed toward it.
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Acting Performances
Tom Hanks gives what may be his most restrained and precise performance as Woody in this film. The character has always been defined by his certainty — his certainty that his purpose is clear, that his place is alongside his child, that love means devotion. In Toy Story 4, that certainty is dismantled, and Hanks communicates the resulting disorientation with a quietness that feels entirely new for the character. The final scenes, in particular, are played with a simplicity that makes them devastating.
Annie Potts' return as Bo Peep is the film's greatest gift. Bo has been absent since the second film, and her reintroduction — confident, independent, and fully realised — is a character revelation. Potts brings warmth and steel to Bo in equal measure; she is funny and capable and deeply human in a way that makes her one of the franchise's finest creations.
Tony Hale is a comedic miracle as Forky. The character is absurd by design — a spork who believes he is garbage — but Hale plays his existential confusion with such genuine sincerity that Forky becomes something more than a joke. His relationship with Woody, as Woody patiently explains to him why he matters, is the film's warmest and funniest subplot.
Keanu Reeves is an unexpected delight as Duke Caboom, the Canadian stuntman toy haunted by his failure to live up to his own commercial. His comic timing is impeccable, and the character's arc — from paralysing self-doubt to joyful self-acceptance — mirrors the film's larger themes with satisfying clarity.
Christina Hendricks brings genuine depth and pathos to Gabby Gabby, ensuring that the villain's emotional journey lands with the impact it deserves.
The film's most memorable line belongs to Woody, in the final scene, speaking to Buzz as the group prepares to say goodbye: "It's called being there for her." Quiet, complete, and absolutely right.
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Strengths
The defining strength of Toy Story 4 is its bravery. This is a film that was widely considered unnecessary and chose, in response, to make itself essential — not by topping the emotional devastation of Toy Story 3, but by going somewhere entirely different. It is a film about independence, reinvention, and the choice to define your own purpose rather than wait for someone else to define it for you. These are not themes the franchise had yet explored, and the film makes them its own with confidence.
The new characters are exceptional. Forky, Ducky and Bunny, Duke Caboom, and Gabby Gabby each represent a different facet of the film's thematic argument, and each is rendered with the specificity and care that marks the best Pixar character work. Gabby Gabby in particular is a creation who has stayed with audiences long after the credits — a character whose villainy is inseparable from her vulnerability.
The animation is genuinely extraordinary. The antique shop is a visual masterpiece — a space that feels lived-in and real and shot with the eye of someone who deeply loves how light behaves in old rooms. This is Pixar at the absolute peak of its technical capability, and the artistry is evident in every frame.
The decision to end where it ends — with Woody making a choice that the franchise's entire history seemed to preclude — is, in hindsight, the only honest ending. It takes the most risk, and it rewards that risk with something that feels genuinely true.
Areas for Improvement
Some viewers have noted that Toy Story 4 feels less ensemble-driven than its predecessors. Buzz, Jessie, Rex, Hamm, and the other familiar toys are largely sidelined in favour of Woody's solo storyline — and while that focus is narratively deliberate, it can feel like an underuse of characters that audiences have loved for twenty years.
The film's ending, while artistically bold and emotionally honest, has divided audiences. Some viewers feel that it is a betrayal of the franchise's central relationship — Woody and Buzz — while others, including this review, see it as the bravest and most thematically complete conclusion the franchise could have chosen. Both responses are valid, which is itself a sign of a film that has dared to do something genuinely risky.
There is also a case to be made that the film's tonal register — more contemplative, less frenetically energetic than its predecessors — makes it less rewarding for the youngest members of its audience. The comedy is excellent, but it is the comedy of character and situation rather than slapstick, and some young children may find the film less immediately thrilling than the earlier instalments.
Comparative Analysis
Toy Story 4 occupies an unusual position in its franchise — it is the film that came after the perfect ending, and it had to justify that position through its own quality rather than through obligation. In this sense it resembles the best of fourth instalments: rare, often unnecessary, but occasionally producing something that recontextualises everything that came before.
The comparison to Toy Story 3 is inevitable, and the two films are doing fundamentally different things. Toy Story 3 is about the completeness of a love — the ending of Andy's childhood as a form of consummation. Toy Story 4 is about what happens after that ending: when the identity you built around that love is gone, what do you become? The latter question is, if anything, more pressing for adult audiences.
In the broader context of 2019 animation — a year that also produced Klaus, Missing Link, and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World — Toy Story 4 was the year's most visually accomplished and thematically ambitious animated film. Its Oscar win was deserved.
Compared to other films that explore similar themes of purpose and reinvention — Wild (2014), Eat Pray Love (2010) — Toy Story 4 is more economical and more honest, perhaps because it uses the abstraction of animated characters to strip away the specifics and get to the universal core.
Target Audience
Toy Story 4 is rated G and is appropriate for all ages, though its thematic preoccupations — identity, independence, self-determined purpose — will resonate most deeply with teenagers and adults. Young children will delight in Forky, the carnival sequences, and the physical comedy of Ducky and Bunny; older viewers will find themselves quietly undone by what happens between Woody and Bo, and by the film's courageous ending.
The film contains no content of concern. There are mildly tense sequences, and Gabby Gabby's antique-shop puppets may briefly unsettle very young viewers, but the film is consistently warm and reassuring at its core.
Viewers who are at a point of personal transition — changing careers, leaving relationships, moving cities, rediscovering themselves after a major life change — may find the film speaks to them with unexpected directness. This is a film about becoming someone new, and it is generous to the difficulty and the beauty of that process.
Personal Impact
Watching Toy Story 4 with the weight of the franchise behind it is a specific and irreplaceable experience. By the time you reach its final scene — as Woody stands at the antique shop door and watches the RV pull away, and as Buzz, from the window, mouths two words to him — you are watching twenty-four years of story arrive at its destination.
The film's ending is not the ending of Toy Story 3, which was complete and devastating and closing. This ending is opening. It is Woody choosing, for the first time, to live for himself — not in service to anyone else's happiness, but in pursuit of his own. And if you have spent twenty-four years watching a character defined entirely by his devotion to others, seeing him make that choice is not sad. It is, quietly, triumphant.
The franchise's parting gift is this: it changed the question from "who will you serve?" to "who will you be?" That is not a bad lesson to leave a child — or a grown adult — with.
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Conclusion
Toy Story 4 (2019) is a film that earned its place in the franchise through artistic courage and genuine emotional intelligence. It did not need to exist, and it chose to exist with such commitment and such beauty that its right to be there is now beyond question. Josh Cooley and his team delivered something that nobody expected: a fourth Toy Story film that justifies the first three by completing the question they began asking, and answering it with honesty.
Watch it on Disney+ — ideally after a rewatch of the first three films. Let the whole arc wash over you. And then, at the end, give yourself permission to feel whatever it brings up.
Where to watch: Disney+
"It's called being there for her." — Woody
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Toy Story 4 remains one of the franchise’s most debated films because it pushes Woody in a direction many fans never expected. These related articles help put that ending into the wider Toy Story story:
FAQs
1. Is Toy Story 4 worth watching? Yes — perhaps more so than many expected. Toy Story 4 holds a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. While it initially seemed unnecessary after Toy Story 3's perfect ending, the film earns its place in the franchise with genuine artistic vision and emotional intelligence.
2. Where can I watch Toy Story 4? Toy Story 4 is available on Disney+, as well as for rental or purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Vudu, and other digital platforms.
3. What happens at the end of Toy Story 4? Woody chooses to stay with Bo Peep rather than return to Bonnie, giving Bonnie his sheriff's star and saying a final farewell to Buzz. It is a controversial but artistically bold ending that completes Woody's character arc across the entire franchise.
4. Who is Forky in Toy Story 4? Forky is a toy made from craft supplies by Bonnie on her first day of kindergarten — a spork with pipe-cleaner arms and a googly-eyed face who does not believe he is a real toy. He is voiced by Tony Hale and quickly became one of the franchise's most beloved new characters.
5. Is Toy Story 4 the last Toy Story film? As of writing, Pixar has confirmed that Toy Story 5 is in development. Whether Toy Story 4 represents the end of Woody's story specifically remains to be seen.
6. Is Toy Story 4 better than Toy Story 3? The two films are very different in tone and intent, making direct comparison difficult. Toy Story 3 is a more emotionally overwhelming experience; Toy Story 4 is quieter, braver, and more philosophically adventurous. Many viewers love both for very different reasons.
7. Who are the new characters in Toy Story 4? The main new characters are Forky (Tony Hale), Bo Peep (returning after an absence, voiced by Annie Potts), Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks), Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves), Ducky (Keegan-Michael Key), and Bunny (Jordan Peele).
8. Did Toy Story 4 win any Oscars? Yes — Toy Story 4 won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards.
9. What is the meaning of Toy Story 4? At its core, Toy Story 4 is about finding self-worth and purpose from within rather than from the validation of others — and about the courage required to choose your own path when the life you built around someone else is no longer available to you.
10. Who directed Toy Story 4? Toy Story 4 was directed by Josh Cooley in his feature film directorial debut.
About the Director
Josh Cooley grew up in Northern California and joined Pixar Animation Studios in 2003, where he worked as a story artist and contributed to films including Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Inside Out (on which he served as a writer). His feature directorial debut with Toy Story 4 demonstrated a rare visual confidence and a profound ability to handle tonal complexity — balancing genuine comedy, visual splendour, and emotional weight with an assurance that belied his relative directorial inexperience. His subsequent career at Pixar continues to be closely watched.
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