Pixar Halted 'Toy Story 5' for Two Weeks to Rewrite Act One

By Elena Vasquez

Pixar stopped production on "Toy Story 5" for two full weeks to rebuild a first act that co-director Kenna Harris says was not working. Harris disclosed the pause on Friday at View Conference in Turin, tracing a path from childhood Jessie superfan to credited co-writer and co-director of the studio's flagship franchise.

The stakes were concrete. A screening-tested story about winning back Bonnie's playtime had left audiences unmoved, and the film's central conflict echoed the original 1995 film's competition for a child's attention. "The stakes of losing playtime felt too soft," Harris explained.

How did a two-week rewrite rescue the film?

Harris broke the pause into two distinct phases. The first week went to diagnosing the problem. The second week, she and director Andrew Stanton rewrote at speed.

"We stopped production for two weeks, and focused on the film's core issue at the time," Harris said. "Our act one was not working."

The breakthrough recast Bonnie's loneliness as the film's emotional engine. Jessie, whose painful history with her former owner Emily was already established in "Toy Story 2," would now strive to help the shy girl make a real friend.

The new character Blaze, previously peripheral, became essential to that journey. "This was the moment that turned an okay movie into a good one," Harris said, citing a noticeable improvement in reactions at internal screenings.

What did Harris bring from fandom to the director's chair?

Stanton invited Harris to co-direct in late 2022, after her work on "Luca," the short "Ciao Alberto" and "Inside Out 2." Harris accepted, then asked to co-write the screenplay despite never having tackled a feature script. The collaboration earned her a screenwriting credit alongside Stanton.

"Who was I to put myself in a position this precarious, where I could very well fail in front of the man who wrote my entire childhood?" Harris recalled.

Her connection to the material dates back decades. Harris displayed childhood fan art at the conference — painstaking reproductions of Jessie drawn from "Toy Story 2," including an imagined moment of Woody offering the cowgirl a flower. "She was my cowgirl through and through," Harris said.

That history shaped creative choices:

• Harris campaigned for Jessie and Buzz to kiss mid-action: "I just think there should be a ton of action, and it should be perilous, and then they should kiss super duper hard," she told Stanton, who agreed.
• The image of Jessie riding a real horse inspired the ranch setting and the character Blaze.
• Harris, production designer Bob Pauley and the story team visited BreyerFest, a Kentucky convention for model horses, for research.

Why is Jessie the protagonist?

The decision to center the sequel on Jessie was contested inside the production. "Part of the risk of this film was having Jessie as the protagonist," Harris revealed, recalling questions about whether audiences would rather watch Woody and Buzz.

The filmmakers held firm. Woody and Buzz would remain important, but Jessie's emotional history gave the sequel its purpose.

One discarded ending had Jessie meet an elderly Emily at her former home. Harris felt it resolved the character's pain too neatly. The team instead returned to the tire-swing tree from "Toy Story 2" and built a more understated climax around a time capsule. Seeing the revised ending at a screening, Harris concluded: "There's no way we're changing it."

How did the film handle its tablet villain?

Lilypad, the tablet threatening Bonnie's attachment to traditional toys, posed its own problem. Harris rejected the notion of an irredeemably evil device. The story needed to acknowledge how difficult it is for children and adults alike to escape technology's grip.

Harris also pushed Pixar's artists toward more spontaneous, painterly images in the film's imagination sequences, away from the studio's usual meticulous realism. "We wanted to lean into something that felt more ephemeral and fleeting," she said. Rapid experiments in lighting, movement and effects became part of a process the crew called "playtime weeklies."

Stanton's guiding idea for the film — that "our limited time with others can impact a lifetime" — framed both Jessie's journey and Harris's own time at Pixar. The larger directing lesson, Harris said, was learning to delegate, invite others into difficult decisions and leave space for play.

"I wanted people to know that I was here," Harris said of leaving a personal imprint on the franchise. By the end of production, that fear had turned into confidence: "I look back now, and I can see that I was here."