Thirty-one years, five films, one composer
The Japanese CD edition of the Toy Story 5 original soundtrack went on sale on September 25, 2026. Catalog number UWCD1151, 27 tracks, about 76 minutes. The film opened in Japan on July 3 and the album went out digitally on June 19, so the physical release arrives rather late. There is still a reason to pick it up: the score is by Randy Newman, who has written all five films in the series since 1995. Born November 28, 1943, he is 82. That is thirty-one years.
Try to name another long-running Hollywood franchise carried from first film to latest by a single composer, and the examples do not come easily. Directors change — this one is by Andrew Stanton and McKenna Harris, and it is Newman's first time working with Stanton. Voice casts feel generational pressure. Yet the music keeps coming from the same pair of hands. This is Newman's tenth Pixar feature; at this point the relationship reads less like a contract than a co-authorship.
Of the 27 tracks, exactly one is Taylor Swift
The album itself arrived from Walt Disney Records on June 19, 2026, the same day the film opened in the United States. Almost all of the coverage went to one track: Taylor Swift's new song "I Knew It, I Knew You," co-written and co-produced with Jack Antonoff. Released as the lead single on June 5, it went to number one on the Billboard Global 200 — reportedly the first song from a Disney/Pixar film ever to top that chart.
But take that one song out and nearly everything else across the 27 tracks is Newman's score. It was recorded across 2025 and 2026 at the Sony Scoring Stage in Culver City, with conducting duties shared between Newman himself and Joey Newman. Reviews abroad noted that the score "dips regularly back into the melody" of the familiar themes "to really tug the heartstrings," and that it "sonically weaves Jessie's anxiety into the film's fabric." The single draws the crowd; the score does the crying. The division of labor works.
What is actually in the Japanese CD
Here are the specifications of the domestic edition.
- UWCD1151 / 27 tracks — released September 25, 2026
- Paper sleeve with picture label — the disc face carries Woody's cowboy hat
- Poster-style booklet — lyrics and illustrations, using artwork from the wedding scene
- First-pressing bonus — a randomly inserted clear file (two designs), while supplies last
Japan also got a companion release on July 15 marking the franchise's thirtieth anniversary there (the first film opened in Japan on March 23, 1996): Best of Toy Story -30 Years & Beyond-. It came in two forms, a standard edition (3,650 yen, 19 tracks, six alternate jackets) and a limited pressing (5,800 yen, with an art board), collecting music from "You've Got a Friend in Me" through the fourth film on a single disc. Put it beside the 27 tracks of the fifth, and you have thirty-one years of Newman on your shelf.
The decision to trust an 82-year-old
Set against the rest of this year's film-music news, the choice stands out. The soundtrack to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, released on September 9, had Brian Tyler taking on Koji Kondo's melodies, with the original composer stepping into a supervisory role while a working Hollywood scorer wrote the cues. When a game or anime series is translated into a tentpole film, that now looks like the standard procedure.
Pixar did not do that. Newman's Academy Award record is 22 nominations and two wins ("If I Didn't Have You" from Monsters, Inc. and "We Belong Together" from Toy Story 3) — a composer nominated almost every time and almost never victorious. And still the fifth film went to him. A story about toys being outrun by electronic devices is scored by the same human piano and orchestra as thirty-one years ago; the casting decision is itself the clearest answer to the film's theme. In Japan the film posted the biggest opening day ever for a foreign animated release, 484,459,420 yen from 320,705 admissions, and by late July it had passed one billion dollars worldwide. Underneath all of it is music written by an 82-year-old.
