Toy Story 5 co-director ‘never planned’ for Jessie to be main character in new Pixar film – but says her past was ‘always something I wanted to address’

Toy Story 5 does not star Woody and Buzz as the main characters
Jessie is the film’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 that he “never planned” for Jessie to replace Woody and Buzz as its main character.

In an exclusive chat with TechRadar, Andrew Stanton admitted that he didn’t approach the new Pixar film’s story with that goal in mind. But when he and fellow writer Kenna Harris brainstormed ideas for the fifth post in the Toy Story franchise, it became clear that Jessie, rather than Buzz and Woody, should be the focal point of the film.

In fact, as Stanton explained, discussions about what a five Toy Story movie could be started three years after the last installment of the movie series, 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 the audience wanted to see.

Latest videos from

Bullseye and Jessie stare at Lilypad's screen in Toy Story 5 — Your eyes are not deceiving you, Jessie – you really are the main character in this movie! (Image credit: Disney Pixar)

It wasn’t until Stanton sat down—first on his own and later with Harris—that he began to visualize Toy Story 5‘s ‘toys meet technology’ narrative and its adjacent themes of screen addiction, childhood loneliness in the digital age and toy-based obsolescence.

The last of these storytelling topics was the key to unlocking Jessie’s starring role in one of 2026’s most anticipated new movies. Until now, fans had only gotten a glimpse of Jessie’s past life via Toy Story 2who revealed that she had been owned by a girl named Emily before being abandoned by 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 not only build Toy Story 5s plot around Jessie, but makes her its central character.

“We never planned it,” Stanton told me about establishing Jessie as the film’s lead. “Basically I was asked in 2022 if I would be interested in doing Toy Story 5 and I said ‘what’s the idea?’. I was told that nobody had one, so I said ‘yeah, I know these movies 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 want to work on it’.

“But I knew Jessie’s past was always something I wanted to address,” he continued. “So, that was an ingredient that I definitely wanted to work on. I also knew that I wanted to do something on devices that had been around for a few years at the time and were getting into the hands of younger and younger kids. Later on, I had the idea of wanting to see 50 Buzz Lightyears in a multi-linked way that ties in with the technology theme of the movie, but in a form that we all had from our good movies.”

Toy Story 5 launches in cinemas worldwide on Friday 19 June. For more exclusive pre-release coverage, find out why Pixar has no plans to tell one Toy Story movie without Woody, Buzz and Jessie yet.