Toy Story 5 hits theaters on June 19.

The villain? Not a creepy collector. Not an evil toy company.

It's a tablet.

Specifically, Lilypad — a frog-shaped tablet voiced by Greta Lee — who shows up in Bonnie's room and turns out to be everything a traditional toy can't easily compete with. The official tagline says it plainly: Toy meets Tech.

And honestly? Pixar didn't make that up.

Here's the actual premise of the movie: Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and the rest of the gang find themselves suddenly irrelevant because Bonnie would rather play with a screen.

Lilypad isn't a mustache-twirling bad guy. She's described as genuinely engaging, endlessly patient, and always available. She doesn't throw tantrums. She doesn't run out of batteries at an inconvenient moment. She doesn't require any imagination to operate.

That's what makes her hard to beat.

And that's probably also what makes this the most relatable Pixar conflict since Andy going to college.

Look — this isn't about demonizing screens. Most of us use them. Our kids use them. Some of it is even fine.

But here's the thing about Lilypad-style entertainment: it fills all the gaps.

And one of those gaps matters more than it looks.

You know the moment. Your kid has nothing to do. They wander around a little. Maybe they pick something up, put it down. Stare at the ceiling. It looks like nothing is happening.

But something is. The brain is doing a slow, unglamorous kind of work — sifting through possibilities, landing on an idea, deciding what to do with it. That's the creative stretch. It's uncomfortable in the short term. It's also where kids learn to direct themselves, generate ideas from scratch, and push through the frustration of figuring something out without a tutorial.

Screens skip straight past it. The gap never opens. And if it never opens, it never gets filled with anything the child actually made themselves.

That's the quiet cost. Not that screens are evil. Just that they're so good at filling space that kids lose practice with the uncomfortable, generative feeling of an empty one.

Nobody is saying your kid is ruined by a tablet. But the gap in that table is real, and it widens quietly.

Here's what's interesting about the Toy Story premise.

Jessie, Woody and Buzz aren't losing to Lilypad because they're broken or outdated. They're losing because Lilypad requires nothing from Bonnie — and that makes her very easy to choose.

But that same quality is also Lilypad's ceiling.

A toy that does everything for you eventually runs out of things to do. A toy that does nothing for you — that just sits there waiting to become something — has no ceiling at all. The play is entirely invented by the child, which means it can go anywhere.

That's not a romantic idea about simpler times. It's actually why certain toys survive decades while others end up at garage sales after a month. The ones that last tend to share a quality: they don't have an opinion about how they should be used. They hand the creative work back to the kid every single time.

So in the spirit of Woody holding his own against a frog tablet, here are a few toys worth knowing about.

The Pajaggle Board Game is part puzzle, part board game — and the goal shifts depending on how you play it. No single right path.

The Rotating Maze Cube is a 3D maze you navigate by tilting and rotating until a ball finds its way through. Kids get stuck, try something different, get unstuck. No screen narrates it for them.

Symmetrix Mirror Magic uses pattern tiles and a mirror that creates unexpected reflections. There are challenge cards if kids want structure, or they can just play around and see what happens.

The Magnetic 9-Piece Tangram — seven shapes, hundreds of possible figures, no app telling anyone they got it wrong.

And the Crazy Climb Track Super Set lets kids design the track themselves, then test it. Messing it up just means building it differently next time.

None of these come with a tutorial. None of them have opinions about how they should be used. They just sit there and wait to be invented.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly what Lilypad can't do.

Go see the movie. It sounds like Pixar at its best.

But maybe also take a look around when it's over.

Not with guilt. Not with a plan to throw out every screen in the house.

Just notice. When does your kid reach for a device — and is it because they genuinely want to, or because it's the thing that's easiest to grab?

And if you want to give them something worth grabbing instead, you know where to look.