Apple Watch added a “Toy Story” face in 2017
One of the world’s biggest entertainment powerhouses has put together a teaser trailer for 2026’s Toy Story 5 by re-using Apple Watch animations from 2017.
The animated Apple Watch faces debuted some two years ahead of the release of 2019’s Toy Story 4. The new animated trailer for the fifth instalment opens with a space alien being winched up by a steel claw, followed by a blue background with the forthcoming film’s logo with Woody, Buzz, and Jessie in the background.
Woody runs up to the foreground to wave hello, Jessie follows with a big wink, and Buzz runs left offstage to reappear in the foreground on the right to give the viewer a salute. These animations used were originally assets by Pixar created for watchOS 4.
Dylan McDonald, owner of SunApps, showed off the re-use of animation assets in a post on X.com, and subsequently posted the Apple Watch faces. He noted that the animations had their original black backgrounds edited out so the characters could appear against a blue background.
McDonald, in his tweet, credited an Apple intern working on the Maps app as initially discovering the re-use of the animation assets. The reaction from commenters on both posts was amusement, with speculation that the actual future film has not yet likely progressed far enough to have any new animation available.
Only two pieces of animation in the trailer are not repurposed from the Apple Watch animations, but instead re-used from other sources. The alien being pulled up by a toy-grabber claw has been seen before, as has the brief animation of Buzz running out-of-shot.
Toy Story 5 is scheduled to debut in the US on June 19th, 2026, and will be written and directed by Andrew Stanton. Stanton helped write the first four Toy Story movies, as well as the Monsters, Inc. series of films.
Stanton co-wrote and directed 2003’s Pixar hit Finding Nemo and it’s sequel Finding Dory. He also co-wrote and directed the 2008 Pixar animated sci-fi romance Wall-E, along with the less-successful live-action Disney film John Carter of Mars.
