Oh, boy. Random objects my son has ensouled:
I actually think his sudden attachment to random objects is pretty adorable. I just never considered the existential consequences before.
Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
Somewhat canon-restoring premise summary of TS5 over at Wikipedia, which I will refrain from quoting here out of deference to the potentially spoiler-sensitive.
Yet Coco just covered ground of the superior The Book of Life.
I barely remember that, but I checked IMDB and I gave it 6/10, while Coco got 8 (and is memorably weepy at the end), so I guess I disagree!
On Toy Story 4, it might not be as good as the first three are, but that doesn’t make it a bad film. In fact, it’s a very good film. Forky is hysterically funny, and yet at the same time does raise some rather profound questions, as detailed in posts above.
What I really want is the story of Coco with the wooden-puppet art style and storytelling framing device of TBoL.
The shorts take place during the time period of TS4. In fact, Toy Story 4 shows Bonnie creating Forky during her first day of school.
As for recent Pixar movies, our family is really fond of Luca. It came out the same year as Disney’s Encanto, and I feel like it was overshadowed by that dreadful Bruno song.
I like TS1-3 but I have to just not think about the “toys are sentient” aspect.
Are toys from 1000 years ago also sentient? Are they still?
Do toys “die”? Or do they remain trapped and thinking at the bottom of the landfill where they ended up 40 years ago?
Do they live forever? Like, will Buzz and Woody still be “alive” in the year 2525?
How much of a toy can be damaged/removed/destroyed before the toy is no longer sentient?
Do all toys go to heaven?
If you sew one doll’s head on another body, which one is the real “personality”?
How much of a tinkertoy or erector set must be assembled, what is the minimum complexity, before sentience is reached?
If a toy is purchased by a collector, and never loved by a child, does it cry in the packaging?
And…did my farm toys have personalities? Just the tractors, or do all the implements have their own separate identities? Even the Styrofoam hay bales?
I went into a similar existential spiral about Cars.
I’ve never watched it (basically for that reason) but I resolved the dilemma by imagining that the cars were originally constructed by humans, and all the humans died, so the cars (which are about as “big-picture” aware as David in AI) just keep doing what they think humans want. Anything in the film that doesn’t make sense can be explained by “cars are dumb”. 
Otherwise the film raises more questions than it answers!
Toy Story: What if toys had feelings?
Cars: What if cars had feelings?
Finding Nemo: What if fish had feelings?
Inside Out: What if FEELINGS had feelings?
Elio suffered from absolutely no advertising. I literally saw over 50 movies this year so far and only twice did I see an Elio trailer, and that was before a screening of The Wedding Singer, maybe not the target audience.
Regarding Elio (which I have not seen), The Hollywood Reporter has an article about the film, how an early test screening and a screening by Pixar management led to the departure of the original director and the toning down of elements that suggested the title character was gay. The article suggests the movie was ruined.
I saw a huge number of ads for Elio on Youtube, for what it’s worth.
I never even heard of Elio until this thread.
Let me just ask my Theseus Action Figure With 30-Oared Galley what it thinks.
If a film has a major gay character- unless it is an adult drama- it will be review bombed by bigots.
How many oars do you have to replace before it becomes a new toy?
Anecdotally, it’s not just about advertising or the lack thereof, but also that the societal buzz is gone. I remember friends chatting enthusiastically about Inside Out in 2015, and the big buzz among college friends, etc. for Pixar movies prior to that. I’ve never heard any friend even make any comment at all about any Pixar film after 2015. The “we’ve got to see this” energy isn’t there. Nobody in my social circle seems excited about an upcoming Pixar; the studio simply lost its magic.
Some of the lack of buzz and advertising also seems to be technology related. CG films benefited from a lot of awareness in the tech/geek community because of how rendering and graphics were always pushing new frontiers–reflections in Finding Nemo, hair dynamics in Brave, etc. There typically were “making of” media supporting the movies alongside the release. It’s been years since I’ve seen any sort of tech featurette promo on the gaming and technology sites that I browse. I wonder if we’ve reached the “good enough” threshold where CG movies are no longer limited by rendering technology, and so there is nothing new technology-wise to show off in Elio or the like.