Conan O'Brien voices Smarty Pants in Toy Story 5, and a Pixar intern helped design him
Pixar handed a potty-training toy to a late-night host with a 30-year bit about his own absurdity. On paper that reads like stunt casting. On the page, it's the cleanest comic-relief slot in the script.
Conan O'Brien is voicing a new character in TOY STORY 5 called Smarty Pants, a Fisher-Price-style potty-training toy who crosses paths with Jessie on what [SlashFilm](https://www.slashfilm.com/2181282/conan-obrien-toy-story-5-character-explained/) frames as her first real solo arc in the franchise. That's the news. The interesting part is underneath it.
The casting looks obvious only after the fact. O'Brien's whole comic register, the self-aware bigness, the willingness to commit to a dumb premise past the point where most performers bail, is exactly the engine a Pixar side character needs. The TOY STORY scene-stealers have always been specificity machines. Rex is anxiety in a t-rex shell. Mr. Pricklepants is a community-theater snob. The bit isn't the toy; the bit is the very narrow human flaw the toy is built around. A potty-training toy voiced by Conan is a one-line pitch that already implies a character arc. That's good screenwriting math.
The other detail worth pulling on, The other detail worth pulling on, per an [AOL](https://www.aol.com/articles/conan-obrien-toy-story-5s-170000000.html) piece quoting production designer Bob Pauley, is that a Pixar intern contributed to Smarty Pants's design, a credit BAD VIDEO has not independently confirmed. Pauley told AOL the intern's pass helped land the balance between gag-toy and believable nursery object. That's a small credit on a big movie, but it tells you something about how Pixar still runs its design pipeline: a junior pass can shape a character the marketing department is going to put on a lunchbox.
It tracks with how this franchise has historically built its supporting cast. The original TOY STORY's character department turned a Mr. Potato Head and a slinky dog into load-bearing comic infrastructure because the design committed to the toy first and the joke second. If Smarty Pants reads on screen the way SlashFilm is betting it will, that's the same trick: the toy has to be a real object before O'Brien's voice can make it funny. An intern who can hold that line is doing real work.
The structural question is in the script's use of him. TOY STORY side characters fail when they get deployed as a running gag with no payoff. They work when the screenplay sets up a small character problem in the first act and pays it off with the toy doing something only that toy could do. Ducky and Bunny in TOY STORY 4 are the textbook example. Forky is the counter-example, a character whose arc front-loaded the movie and then had nowhere to go in the back half. Smarty Pants is going to live or die on whether the screenplay knows what he wants and whether what he wants pays off the Jessie story he's attached to.
Which is the actual stakes question here. Jessie carrying a TOY STORY movie is a structural shift the franchise has been circling since TOY STORY 2. If Smarty Pants is the comic relief riding shotgun on that arc, his job isn't to steal the movie, despite SlashFilm's framing. His job is to make Jessie's story land. A scene-stealer who pulls focus from the protagonist is a screenplay problem, not a feature. The good news is that Pixar usually knows the difference. The better news is that O'Brien, as a performer, has spent a career playing second banana to the bit and letting the bit win. That's the right instinct for this slot.
The release date gives them seven months of marketing runway, which means we'll see Smarty Pants in a trailer well before we see him in context. Reserve judgment until the character has a scene, not a sizzle reel. Pixar's intern, whoever they are, has already done the harder half of the job.