Warning: This story contains slight spoilers for Toy Story 5.
Toy Story 5 has a beautiful scene involving a bevy of abandoned Buzz Lightyears attempting to get bavk home. The Buzzes find themselves in a forest and discover nature for the first time. They encounter a deer and a rabbit, and a familiar tune plays in the background.
Every Disney fan immediately recognizes the reference: it’s an homage to Bambi, featuring CGI stand-ins for the titular doe and Thumper, soundtracked by the 1942 film’s iconic “Love Is a Song.”
As the Toy Story 5 brain trust explains to Gold Derby, the idea to pay tribute to one of Walt Disney’s most indelible films came early on in development. But the moment wasn’t quite working until director Andrew Stanton came up with the perfect solution.
“We had the scene boarded — the Buzzes all in nature, meeting these animals — but we didn’t have a track in mind and something wasn’t really clicking,” adds co-director McKenna Harris. “Andrew was like, ‘This is an homage to Bambi. What if we put in the music?’ We said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘No, no — the track.’ And he put it on the scene and suddenly all of us were just… it immediately became the full form you see in the film.”
“It started as a nod and became a full homage,” recounts producer Lindsey Collins. “We were just like — commit. Got to commit. And the surrealness of 50 Buzz Lightyears in a scene from Bambi is like, ‘What is happening?’ That storyline always needed to feel like you didn’t know where it was going. Every scene had to lean into the surrealness of it.”
