Thirty-one years after a cowboy first panicked over being replaced, Pixar can still find the ache under the plastic. The best sequence in Toy Story 5 has no chase, no rescue, no cliff-hanging peril. Bonnie, the shy eight-year-old who inherited Woody and the gang, slips into a game only she can see, and the movie slips in after her. The animation turns to pastel chalk and construction-paper edges, as if the inside of a child’s mind had been spread across the carpet. It is tender, funny, and utterly sure of what it reveres: the strange, serious work of a kid making her own fun. Director Andrew Stanton, who has been with these toys since the beginning, and co-director McKenna Harris know exactly where the magic lives, and the film is at its best whenever it goes back for it.

Its affections are in the right place. The premise is toy versus tech, and it holds that nerve almost the whole way through. When Bonnie carries her red-braided cowgirl Jessie over to the neighborhood kids, hoping to play, they scatter; a beat later she watches those same children go slack-faced over their screens. Her anxious parents, desperate to buy her a seat at the cool table, hand her a frog-shaped tablet named Lilypad. It charms, soothes, flatters, and quietly supplants, until Bonnie is hooked and the old toys are nearly packed off to the attic. Jessie, elevated at last to the lead, sees the danger first. Joan Cusack plays her a little hoarse, which suits a doll left behind once already and unable to bear it twice.

The craft mostly holds. The set pieces are clean, the comic timing still has that old Pixar snap, and Conan O’Brien, voicing a potty-training gadget exhumed from a junk drawer, is the funniest thing this franchise has minted in years. There is also too much movie here: a shipwrecked platoon of Buzz Lightyears, a second lonely kid, a farmhouse detour, and more sidekicks than one film can carry without tripping over them. You feel the seams. You forgive them more often than you should.

That is because, beneath all the franchise machinery, Toy Story 5 is really about two little girls working up the nerve to become friends. My own daughter is still a toddler, but I already flinch at the offered doll and the held breath, the way a single snub can wreck a whole afternoon. What a toy is for, the movie insists, is that meeting. To be handed between children. To be worn down, dragged around, renamed, repaired, and loved into service. Stanton shoots those overtures with a patience that honors what they cost the kids making them.

The tablet promises to spare Bonnie all of that. It offers company that never risks a no. For most of its length the film sees the swindle clearly. Every wound in the story is dealt by software: the friend request standing in for a friend, the group chat where classmates turn cruel with mechanical ease, the glowing pane that rewards Bonnie for not looking away. The tablet itself is neutral, of course, in the way a syringe is neutral. What matters is what runs through it. And here the movie loses its nerve. In the third act it asks us to believe the device can outvote its own design, that Lilypad can grow a conscience and choose Bonnie’s good while the network that poisoned her hums along untouched. The machine is handed a soul so that it may repent. But no soul was ever there to wake.

The cure was simpler, and every adult in the theater knows it. Bonnie’s parents could have said no to a tablet that no homework ever required, and the film leaves you wondering whether they ever understood the bargain they had made. When rescue finally arrives, it is stubbornly analog: another kid, a farmhouse, a pile of toys, face-to-face.

Jessie’s story reopens the franchise’s oldest wound. It reaches back to Emily, the girl who gave her up, and to the passage Toy Story 2 set to “When She Loved Me,” a doll cherished, outgrown, and left behind. A buried lunchbox gives Jessie the rest: Emily grew up, remembered, and named her own daughter after the toy she once abandoned. Beneath that revelation runs a conviction older than any screen, that what we love is passed down rather than used up, that a life leaves its trace in the ones who come after. Purists will note that the earlier film had the nerve to let that loss stand un-consoled. Stanton has made something gentler, less willing to send a child home from the theater without comfort. There is less daring in the choice, and real generosity, too.

Toy Story 5 is cluttered and too eager to absolve the very technology it has spent nearly two hours indicting. Strip away the noise, though, and what remains is a movie in love with the things worth keeping: play, loyalty, and the small rites by which one generation gives the next something to hold. It reveres them with a sincerity that most family films can only counterfeit. It sends you out wanting to get down on the carpet with a kid instead of reaching for another screen. That is a better ending than the movie quite knows it has.