The toys are up against something genuinely new in Toy Story 5, and the character best positioned to answer it is a spork with googly eyes. Tony Hale sees that irony as the whole point.
Forky made his gloriously deranged debut in Toy Story 4 and returns here with Hale voicing him again. He is still assembled from a plastic spork, pipe cleaners and whatever else was in the craft drawer. In a movie about screens rewriting how kids play, that construction turns out to matter enormously.
For Hale, coming back was never just a chance to revisit a funny bit. He thinks Forky is carrying something central to what the film is actually arguing.
Toy Story 5 became another enormous success
Three decades past the first Woody and Buzz Lightyear adventure, this franchise refuses to lose altitude.
Toy Story 5 opened to nearly $160 million domestically, a new franchise record. It has since pulled more than $436 million in North America and over $964 million worldwide, putting the billion-dollar mark within arm’s reach.
Numbers like that say something about how deep the attachment runs, and Tony Hale recognizes what sits underneath them. The first film landed in 1995, which means a substantial share of the audience now buying tickets watched Andy’s toys as kids and are bringing their own children.
Almost nothing stays relevant that long. The animation has advanced beyond recognition and the world around the toys has changed completely, but whatever the movies are actually about has held steady.
The franchise still reaches every generation
These films have always known that a kid and a parent are watching two different movies in the same seat.
Younger viewers get the color, the jokes, the chase sequences. Adults get the questions underneath. What do you do when your life changes shape without asking? Where does purpose come from once the old one expires? How do you let go of people and places that used to define you?
Plastic, fabric and stuffing, and yet the anxieties land as recognizably human. Woody fears being forgotten. Buzz cannot get a fix on who he is. Jessie is still processing abandonment. Forky arrives convinced he belongs in the garbage and has to be talked into his own worth.
That emotional honesty is the engine, and Tony Hale finds meaning in exactly that mix. The movies are funny, and they have never flinched from growing up, moving on and accepting that every chapter eventually hands off to the next one.
Why Tony Hale sees Forky as pure imagination
Bonnie made Forky in Toy Story 4 out of ordinary craft supplies. No factory. Nothing packaged in a box. There was never a product design meeting.
He became a toy because a child decided he was one.
That makes him the right character for a movie that pits traditional toys against Lilypad, a tablet voiced by Greta Lee. Disney has framed the premise as “Toy meets Tech,” with Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the rest working out what happens to playtime once a screen starts competing for Bonnie’s attention.
Forky sits at the far opposite end of that spectrum. No batteries, no updates, no apps, no features of any kind. He is evidence that a kid can build an entire personality out of disposable cutlery.
Technology is a normal part of childhood now, and nobody in this movie pretends otherwise. Forky just makes the case that imagination never needed the hardware.
Tony Hale sees Toy Story 5 as timely
Tony Hale understands exactly why this character belongs in this particular story.
The homemade look is what makes Forky funny. It is also what gives him standing in the argument the film is having. He exists because Bonnie looked at a pile of trash and saw a friend in it.
That is imagination with nothing else attached.
His presence lets Toy Story 5 explore technology without losing track of what made toys meaningful to begin with. Tony Hale sees the importance of that distinction. A toy does not have to be sophisticated to matter. It has to earn a connection, and Forky earned his on day one.
Click on the video below to hear Tony Hale discuss Forky’s return and how the character ties into the movie’s questions about technology and childhood.
Toy Story 5 is still playing in theaters.
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