Taylor Swift and Andrew Stanton on Why ‘Toy Story 5’ Had to Be Jessie’s Movie

Reporting by Katrina Hoeglund and Larissa de Andrade for The Nerd Wire | Written by Katrina Lee

Woody has been through enough. That, in short, is why Toy Story 5 belongs to Jessie.

“Woody kind of deserves a break,” director Andrew Stanton told the room Sunday morning at a Disney awards-season screening and Q&A in New York, where he was joined by Taylor Swift, who wrote and produced the film’s end-credits song, “I Knew It, I Knew You.” “He’s been through a lot. He’s been solved to a certain degree. But not Jessie.”

Stanton has lived with these toys for three decades, and he was candid about how much the gap between films changes the person making them. “When I worked on Toy Story and Toy Story 2, I was a new parent, and by the time I was working on Toy Story 5, I was a grandparent, or about to be,” he said. “That’s how old I am and how long it’s been. But it’s also how we keep finding fresh perspectives — not only to make it, but to find something honest to express that doesn’t feel retread.”

The richest room Pixar never went into

Jessie, Stanton said, was carrying “a lot of deep, unaddressed stuff that Woody used to,” and the franchise had skipped past the place he always wanted to go: a girl’s room, and a girl’s relationships.

“The power of connection of another friend being made, or missing that chance of connecting with that person that really sees you for who you are, is probably the highest-stakes thing we’ve ever had in a Toy Story movie,” he said. “And I love that that was on Jessie’s watch, because she was somebody that already had abandonment issues and doubted her ability to hold a child. That’s rich stuff to just start with.”

He also pointed to a luxury most films never get: an audience that has already done the emotional homework. “I didn’t have to tell a big backstory. I didn’t have to spend 15 minutes trying to tell you that once there was this toy — I could just remind you of the tree, and everybody has been along for the ride for however long they’ve been on this planet.”

Where Jessie would end up was not a given. “I didn’t know she was going to be the battler of technology,” Stanton said. “But I knew that it was time to be with her, and she would run a room differently, and she would deal with the world differently.”

Parachutes

Swift’s song is written from Jessie’s point of view, and she described building it around one image: toys as parachutes for “the free fall of being younger.”

“It’s literal in the sense of Toy Story 5 in that they’re toys. They’re tiny when they’re standing on the ground. They’re looking at their kid through the blades of grass,” she said. “In terms of childhood, that means you were there to soften the blow of all those hard lessons that we have to learn as kids. You were there for me in those moments.” She admitted she was also thinking of the little green army men and their parachutes from the first film.

The goal, she said, was a song that applied to every character but landed hardest on Jessie and Emily — and on the feeling Jessie arrives at by the end: “this really incredible feeling of mature, resolute clarity.”

“All that doubt she felt throughout the whole film — am I no good at being a toy? Am I pointless? Is it hopeless? Is it useless to try? Things we all go through in our lives,” Swift said. “She realizes that even if you were there for someone in a phase of their life, if you meant something to them, then that’s powerful. I think parents go through this when their kid goes through a different phase of life and is wanting freedom and independence — you have to learn how to say these little goodbyes. We have to also learn how to value what was. That’s what really, really hit me.”

Reaching for Randy Newman chords

Asked about process, Swift said she left the screening with the lines and a chorus melody already in her head, then went straight to Jack Antonoff, who she described as “a Toy Story kid” and “a freak fan” of Randy Newman.

“I want to reach for chords that are really different than what I would ever do, but might land in the world of possibly something Randy Newman might do,” she said. “I really don’t want us to do something that’s incongruous with this beautiful tapestry that Randy’s been weaving for all these years.”

The result, she said, was a stretch for both of them, “in reverence to our fandom, to the maestro who created this whole thing. He built this beautiful pool we get to splash in.” They wrote it fast, and she said they are both “so proud of it.”

The same genre of weird

The thread Swift kept returning to was Stanton’s idea of finding someone who is “the same genre of weird and silly as you are” — which is why Bonnie and Blaze’s story landed the way it did.

She was 14 and the new kid in Nashville, she said, sizing up who to be friends with, “but there was one girl, named Abigail, and she even has curly hair too, like Blaze.” The two of them mostly wanted to talk in Napoleon Dynamite voices. “We still do this,” Swift said. “It’s something our husbands have to put up with.”

“When you find that person who just completely sees you for the strange little genre that is you at your purest — that hit me so hard watching the film.”

She was five when the first Toy Story arrived, and said the films shaped “so much of every kid’s sense of what comedy is and what friendship is and what bravery is.” Jessie’s arrival in the second film was the one that stuck. “I never knew I was missing her until she showed up,” she said. “This girl is so cool and so herself and so unapologetically enthusiastic. And sometimes she’s too much for people. I think so many people saw themselves in Jessie’s utter fearlessness. And also her vulnerability — there’s no cynicism to her.”

Then she turned to Stanton: “You both just did extraordinary things.”

The two stayed on after the Q&A to meet the audience, which is about as on-brand an ending as a Jessie movie could ask for.

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Toy Story 5 is streaming on Disney+. “I Knew It, I Knew You” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the first Pixar song to do so.