The rumors were true…
In April, we reported that Taylor Swift had sparked rumours that a new song could be on the way and that it would feature in the upcoming fifth instalment in Pixar’s Toy Story franchise.
A countdown briefly appeared on the singer’s official website, and since then, Swifties have been sifting through clues – interpreting colour choices, dissecting Swift’s outfits, and going mad over a billboard bearing the initials “TS”…
Check it out below:
Now, the speculation has ended, as the song has been officially announced.
Titled ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’, Swift’s song written for Toy Story 5 comes out this Friday (5 June), two weeks ahead of the film’s 19 June release.
In a statement, Disney teased the song as a return to the country music genre for Swift.
“Inspired by the rootin’ tootin’ cowgirl Jessie’s ongoing journey in Toy Story 5 that began back in Toy Story 2, ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’ also marks a return to Taylor Swift’s country roots, blending styles that have defined her record-breaking career as a songwriter and artist,” Disney shared.
“It’s incredible just how meaningful it’s been having Taylor write and perform this song. Her connection to Jessie and the immediate way she understood what the character was going through was undeniable. The song is so deeply connected to Toy Story. So much so that on first listen, it instantly felt like it had always belonged there, like a long-lost family member,” writer-director Andrew Stanton shared in another statement.
As for Swift, she says she was inspired to write the song after watching an early screening of the upcoming movie.
“It’s a Toy Story … I’ve always dreamed of getting to write for these characters who I’ve adored since I was a 5 year old kid watching the first Toy Story movie. I fell instantly in love with Toy Story 5 when I was lucky enough to see it in its early stages, and I wrote this song as soon as I got home from the screening. Sometimes you just know, right?” Swift wrote on X.
‘I Knew It, I Knew You’ was co-written and co-produced by Swift and her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, who last worked with Swift on her 2024 album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’.
It isn’t the first time Taylor Swift has written music for movies, with the singer having penned songs for the likes of The Hunger Games (‘Safe & Sound’), One Chance (‘Sweeter Than Fiction’), Fifty Shades Darker (‘I Don’t Wanna Live Forever’), Cats (‘Beautiful Ghosts’) and Where The Crawdads Sing (‘Carolina’).
Her last album was 2025’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’.
Toy Story 5 will pick up after Woody left to stay with Bo Peep at the end of the last movie. Jessie is now the leader of Bonnie’s room, with Buzz Lightyear her second-in-command. However, the young Bonnie is now enamoured with her new favourite toy, a frog-like tablet named Lilypad.
Tom Hanks, who voices Woody, has said that the film highlights children’s addictions to screens, sharing that the cast related to the storyline because they had all “met that disinterest” of young people who “look down at their phone, look up, look down, look up”.
“This is a generational thing,” he told the BBC, “where one generation has this thing that defines them technologically in society, and they pour everything into it.”
The actor highlighted “a moment in the movie where we look out on the cityscape and we see that blue glow of a phone in bedrooms and whatnot, and it does strike terror into the heart”.
Tim Allen, who voices Buzz Lightyear, also shared that he had recently clashed with his teenage daughter during a cinema trip after she quickly lost patience because children are now “so used to seven-second movies on Instagram”.
“She actually looked at a motion picture and went, ‘I get it! He’s going to be the villain and they’re going to do this,’” Allen told the BBC. “We had a little argument. I said, ‘from now on, if we go to movie theatres, we watch the movie, and you can [complain] about it afterwards’. But she wasn’t wrong.”
Allen said younger audiences were now “so used to a beginning, middle and end arc in seven seconds” because of social media that many struggled to stay engaged with longer films “other than Avatar”, which he described as “an experience”.
Several governments are increasingly seeking to curb children’s use of smartphones and social media.
Last year, Australia became the first country to introduce a nationwide minimum age of 16 for social media accounts. Other countries like Spain, Norway and Denmark are pursuing similar measures. MPs in France recently voted to block access for under-15s, with President Emmanuel Macron hoping it will be in force by September.
In 19 of the 27 EU countries, more than 90% of young people aged 16 to 29 said they use social media networks in 2025, according to Eurostat figures.
Toy Story 5 hits theatres on 19 June.
