The Frog on the Screen
Four days before a cowboy doll and a plastic astronaut returned to cinemas for the fifth time, the British Prime Minister stood at a Downing Street lectern and announced that children under sixteen would be banned from social media. The date was 15 June 2026. On 19 June, Toy Story 5 opened worldwide. No screenwriter could have timed it better.
Pixar’s latest instalment, directed by Andrew Stanton and already past the billion dollar mark at the global box office, is the franchise’s most overtly political film. Its antagonist is not a menacing neighbour or a scheming collectible. It is a frog shaped tablet called Lilypad, voiced with unsettling charm by Greta Lee, which arrives in eight year old Bonnie’s bedroom and proceeds to do what tablets do. In the fairy tale everyone knows, you kiss the frog and it becomes a prince. In Bonnie’s room, you give a child a frog and she stops talking to everyone else. She stops playing. She stops imagining. She stares at a screen while her toys watch from the shelf, as redundant as yesterday’s newspaper. At a sleepover, every girl sits with her own device, together in a room but unreachable. Tom Hanks, voicing Woody for the fifth time, told the BBC that watching children interact with screens fills him with something close to dread.
That terror has already migrated from the multiplex to the ministry. Australia banned social media for under sixteens last December; Britain and France are following. But it was Israel’s version of the crackdown that carried the sharpest irony. In February 2026, the Israeli Ministry of Education banned mobile phones from elementary school grounds. By May, the education minister extended the ban to middle schools, effective from September. His reasoning was almost a line of Pixar dialogue: too many children sitting together in the same classroom but each one sealed inside a separate screen. Bonnie’s sleepover, transposed to a Haifa classroom.
The intellectual scaffolding behind these policy shifts was largely built by Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist whose 2024 book The Anxious Generation argued that smartphones had fundamentally altered the architecture of childhood and triggered an epidemic of adolescent mental illness. Haidt’s four foundational harms, social deprivation, sleep disruption, attention fragmentation and addiction, mapped with uncomfortable precision onto the world Pixar was simultaneously constructing in its Emeryville studios. In the film, Bonnie’s sleep suffers. Her friendships become performative. Her capacity for sustained imaginative play, the kind developmental psychologists regard as foundational, withers. In Israel, research cited by the Ministry of Education found that eighty three per cent of children aged eight to fifteen own a smartphone, that a quarter use them for more than five hours daily, and that some receive their first device at age six. The youngest smartphone owner in the dataset was a first grader. There is no Hebrew word for Lilypad, but there did not need to be.
The sharper irony is not that Israel banned the frog from the classroom but that it simultaneously invited the frog back in through a different door. In the very same month Toy Story 5 opened, the same education minister who confiscated phones stood beside the prime minister at a middle school east of Jerusalem to launch Project 720, a national programme to teach English through artificial intelligence. The September that strips mobile screens from desks is the same September that installs AI screens in their place. It is not a contradiction so much as a confession: the argument was never really about technology. It was about who holds the remote.
That distinction matters, and Pixar, to its credit, draws it carefully. Toy Story 5 is not a Luddite manifesto. Lilypad is not evil. She is, in her own logic, doing exactly what she was designed to do: connect a shy child to her peers, answer questions, entertain. The film’s sharpest observation is not that technology harms children but that it harms them when it displaces everything else. When Bonnie’s parents buy the tablet, they do so out of genuine concern. Their daughter is lonely. The device promises friendship. What it delivers is something closer to anaesthesia. Not poison, but a dosage no one thought to measure.
Thirty one years separate the original Toy Story from its fifth chapter. In 1995, the threat to Woody was another toy. In 2026, it is the abolition of toys altogether. The franchise has always been about obsolescence, about what happens when you are no longer needed. But this time the stakes extend beyond the toy box. If a generation of children can be drawn so completely into a screen that they forget how to play, what else will they forget? How to be bored. How to build a world from a cardboard box and a felt tip pen. How to sit with a friend in silence and let the silence be enough.
The film ends, as these films do, with a kind of rescue. But the bedroom it returns to is not quite the one it left. The toys are back on the shelf. The frog is still on the desk, its screen dark, waiting to be touched. The room is full of objects and emptied of something harder to name.