Toy Story 5 hit theaters this weekend and pulled in the biggest opening weekend of any movie this year, domestic or animated, with a fresh Taylor Swift song on the soundtrack for good measure. Turns out a few million of us still want to know what happens when Woody and Buzz get left behind in the move to a tablet.
It’s easy to think Pixar just make kids’ movies, but as anyone who grew up watching them knows, it’s so much deeper than that. Pixar makes modern parables. The studio has spent over three decades smuggling real, weighty truths into stories about toys and superheroes and a depressed fish, and a lot of those truths line up strikingly well with what Scripture’s been saying for thousands of years.
We can’t cover the whole catalog. But here are four Pixar films that hit deeper than “cute movie for the kids.”
Toy Story
The original. The one that started it all.
Woody’s got the best gig in the world: Andy’s favorite toy, undisputed leader of the toy box. Then Buzz Lightyear shows up and Woody’s entire identity goes up in flames.
What follows is basically a leadership crisis. Woody spends most of the movie trying to get rid of Buzz, not because it’s the right thing to do but because his ego can’t handle competition. It’s only when he and Buzz get stranded together, totally dependent on each other, that Woody starts to get it: leadership was never about being the favorite.
Paul could’ve been writing Woody’s character arc when he told the Philippians, “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3). Jesus put it even more bluntly in Luke 22:26: “Let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.”
By the end, Woody’s genuinely Buzz’s friend. That’s the whole movie’s argument: real leadership looks less like a throne and more like a foot-washing.
The Incredibles
Being a Christian in a mostly secular space can feel a little like having a secret identity. You learn which rooms it’s safe to bring it up in. You get good at code-switching.
The Parr family knows that feeling intimately, minus the cool powers, presumably. The government’s made them hide who they are and blend in as “normal,” and Bob Parr is dying inside trying to live a beige powerless life. He’s not built for it and pretending otherwise is wrecking him.
We’re told we’re supposed to be in the world but not of it. Hiding what makes you different from the culture around you was never the assignment.
By the end, the Parrs stop hiding. Violet finally has the guts to talk to her crush, no longer using her invisibility powers to disappear from her own life. Dash gets to run at full speed without holding back to seem normal. The whole family is freer the second they stop pretending to be ordinary.
Imagine what happens when we stop doing the same thing with our faith.
WALL-E
WALL-E opens about as bleak as an animated movie gets: Earth abandoned, buried in trash, 800 years after humanity packed up and left. The only thing still doing its job is a lonely trash-compacting robot who’s been alone so long he’s started collecting human keepsakes just to feel something.
Then EVE shows up and WALL-E falls instantly, hopelessly in love. She wants nothing to do with him.
He doesn’t take the hint. He follows her. Leaves her gifts. Shows up over and over with zero indication it’s working. She doesn’t turn toward him until she’s hit rock bottom on a dead planet, completely out of options. Even after she’s swept away to another galaxy, he goes after her anyway.
It’s hard to watch that and not think of grace. WALL-E isn’t a Christ figure exactly, but his relentless, undeserved pursuit of someone who keeps pushing him away is a pretty good picture of how God chases us.
Inside Out
Riley’s a normal kid with one unusual feature: we get to watch the five emotions running her brain from mission control. Joy’s in charge and she’s convinced her job is to keep Sadness as far from the steering wheel as possible.
Joy spends most of the movie trying to write Sadness out of the story entirely, locking her in a memory dump and exiling her to the Forgotten Corners. She thinks Sadness is a malfunction. It takes nearly losing Riley completely for Joy to learn that Sadness isn’t the enemy. She’s necessary.
Christians aren’t called to chase happiness nonstop. We’re called to actually feel things all the way through and let God use even the hard ones.
“Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him praise” (James 5:13). The verse doesn’t say to pretend you’re fine or skip to the praising. Feel it, then bring it to God.
Paul goes further in 1 Peter 5:10: suffering isn’t the opposite of grace. It’s often the route to it. God uses the low points to do something in us that the high points can’t.
Inside Out tells that story through the lens of puberty, which might be the most emotionally chaotic season any of us survive. The takeaway holds for the rest of life too: whatever you’re feeling, God’s not asking you to fake it. He’s asking you to bring it to him.
Pixar movies make for unconventional sermon material. But like any good art, the best of them are pointing at something true. A story about a cowboy doll losing his place to a tablet is apparently still enough to make this the biggest movie of the year — they’re a lot more fun to sit through than most sermons, too.
