Did Disney pull a Mickey Mouse move by using old Apple Watch animation on Toy Story 5 promo?

Last night D3, the official Disney fan club, held its annual event and Pixar used the opportunity to release a video teaser for the upcoming Toy Story 5. A tweet from an app developer by the name of Dylan McDonald pointed out how the Toy Story 5 teaser simply shows animations used by the Toy Story watch face that was available for the Apple Watch starting with watchOS 4. The characters involved include Woody, Jessie, and Buzz Lightyear. Apple added the Toy Story watch face in 2017 which was two years ahead of the 2019 release of Toy Story 4. 

The video teaser for Toy Story 5 starts with one of those football-headed three-eyed green aliens getting pulled up by the kind of claw found in the claw machine games played by kids looking to win a prize. Following the logo for the fifth installment of the series, each of the three characters takes a turn with the animation mirroring the 2017 Apple Watch face perfectly.

Woody runs up to the screen and with his "Aw shucks" personality, he waves hello to everyone watching the clip. Jessie approaches the screen and gives everyone a wink of her eye. Buzz runs to the left and goes off stage and suddenly appears in the foreground on the right and he gives a salute to those watching.

Get excited for their next chapter as Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the gang all return for #ToyStory5, coming to theaters Summer 2026! #D23pic.twitter.com/w5yrlbkpYP

— Pixar (@Pixar) August 10, 2024

McDonald, the owner of SunApps, says that an Apple intern working on the Apple Maps app was the one who originally discovered the origin of the animation used on the teaser. Some accused Pixar and Disney of laziness or suffering from a lack of imagination forcing them to reuse the 2017 animation. The truth might be a lot less insulting to Pixar and Disney. It seems that there is a possibility that not enough footage of the new film is available yet to use for a trailer. Toy Story 5 will be in a theater near you starting on June 19th, 2026. 

As many of you know, Pixar has very close ties to Apple through the late Steve Jobs. The Apple co-founder paid $5 million to George Lucas of Star Wars fame, invested $5 million in the company and was named Chairman of Pixar. This happened after Jobs was booted out of Apple by his hand-picked CEO John Scully and had founded NeXT. In March 1991, Jobs became the full owner of Pixar, and a few months later, Disney signed a three-film deal with Pixar. The first of the films created under the contract was the original Toy Story movie which became a blockbuster.

Less than a year before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, he sold Pixar to Disney. The date was January 24, 2006, and Disney paid $7.4 billion for the company, all in Disney stock. As a result, Steve Jobs became the largest stockholder in Disney for a period of time. And this has led to almost an annual flurry of speculation about Apple merging with Disney.