Last weekend (Aug 30-31, 2025) was the Destination D23 Event at the Walt Disney World Resort. While this D23 event isn’t as big as the D23 Expos held every other year, the Destination D23 Event still manages to keep Disney fans on their toes with exciting film, parks, and merchandise announcements.
SMARTY PANTS CHARACTER REVEAL
Kicking off the weekend-long festivities was the Walt Disney Studios Showcase. During the Toy Story 5 presentation, an image of Smarty Pants popped up on the screen. Voiced by Conan O’Brien, Smarty Pants is a toilet training toy and is already cracking us up!
CONAN’S TOY STORY 5 INVOLVEMENT
If you recall, O’Brien first announced his involvement with the film back in May 2025 via Instagram.
This past July 2025, O’Brien shared a photo of himself at Pixar Animation Studios. When a voice actor goes to Pixar, they are welcomed to sign the red wall outside of one of their recording booths. Well, in typical Conan O’Brien style, he decided that since he voiced a potty training toy, he would sign the wall of one of the studio bathrooms!
OTHER REVEALS FROM DESTINATION D23
Laughing Place’s video provides a great front-row view of the event, which is uploaded on their YouTube channel (embedded below).
Although the video summarizes a lot of Pixar’s announcements, here are a few highlights.
TOY STORY
TOY STORY 5 – BUZZ CLIPS
The same clip shown at Annecy of the 50 High-tech Buzz Lightyears on the beach was screened – read a summary in our prior post.
LILY PAD IMAGES
Some toolkit animations for Lily Pad, the Toy Story 5 villain, were shown during the event. In Toy Story 5, there is an underlying theme of “when toy meets tech”. The animation shown previewed Lily Pad receiving messages, expressions of happiness and anger, and we are loving the expressive eyes! We can’t wait to see more of this new character.
HIGH-TECH BUZZ IMAGES
Cool new images of what the new High-tech Buzz toys look like – check out that slick, new black honeycomb plastic on his torso. The updated Star Command chestplate logo is really bold, as well. Toy Story 5 is slated for a Summer release on June 19, 2026.
BUZZ LIGHTYEAR MACY’S THANKSGIVING PARADE BALLOON
Can you believe the last time Buzz Lightyear’s balloon was in the Thanksgiving Day parade was in 2013? Not only is Buzz returning, but his new design looks fantastic, and we can’t wait to see him soar by – he’ll be hard to miss since he’s 58 feet long!
HOPPERS ON STAGE
We were happy to see Bobby Moynihan (voice of King George), Piper Curda (voice of Mabel), Daniel Chong (Director), and Nicole Paradis Grindle (Producer) on stage during the event. They showcased three clips (previously shown at Annecy) to the new audience. Those online noted that the crowd was cracking up in laughter!
Oh, and it was fun to see that the event highlighted the viral lizard, Tom, from Hoppers during the event. Seriously, who knew the silly post-credits clip shown during Elio would take off the way it did? So fun – lizard, lizard, lizard!
By the way, no one knows anything else about how this lizard fits into Hoppers yet, but everyone already loves him. Hoppers will hit theaters on March 6, 2026.
GATTO LOGO REVEAL
During the event, they discussed the timeline for upcoming Pixar projects, and in doing so, they quietly revealed the updated logo for Gatto.
How cute is that logo? We love the sketched nature of the text and how the ears and whiskers are included. A nice subtle way to tease that the movie involves a cat, even if someone wasn’t aware that “gatto” means “cat” in Italian.
This also implies that Incredibles 3 will release in 2028, and we assume Coco 2 would be the “beyond” part of the reveal. Gatto is slated for a June 18, 2027, release.
