Toy Story 2 delves into themes both the Toy Story franchise and Pixar itself would dissect over the next decade Buzz and Woody’s friendship drives all of the Toy Story movies. Toy Story 2 isn’t just the best Toy Story movie. There will be partisans of all four films until the end of time.īut I am here to tell you that people who don’t think 1999’s Toy Story 2 is the greatest Toy Story film or that the two films that follow it will forever live in its shadow are wrong.
This is, of course, inevitable in a franchise where every movie is superbly designed, lovingly written, and wonderfully performed. But in recent years, I’ve begun to bristle a bit when Toy Story fans say the third is the greatest of the movies. I greatly love both Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4. That it finds a new angle on the themes of mortality that 2010’s Toy Story 3 already handled, but one that is bittersweet and wistful to the sheer bombast of Toy Story 3, is even more impressive. That it is able to find yet another new spin on the secret lives of toys is a testament to the studio’s continued strength of imagination. With Toy Story 4, Pixar has the unenviable task of following up what was already a perfect trio of films, charting themes of birth, life, and death with lovely grace, despite the fact that their main characters are just a bunch of toys.
