Five films in, singling out your favorite “Toy Story” movie feels like the animated kiddie-fairy-tale equivalent of naming your favorite Beatles album. You might have one, but why choose? These movies now add up to a canon greater than the sum of their boisterously funny, deliriously inventive parts. The truth is that the “Toy Story” movies are all beautiful, all brilliant, all different, and they work all together now. They’re a vision — of childhood life and nostalgic tenderness, of jostling ego and maniacal slapstick fun, of pure moviemaking enchantment. On that score, if the original “Toy Story” (still my favorite) is “Meet the Beatles,” and “Toy Story 3” is “Sgt. Pepper,” the splendidly catchy and seductive “Toy Story 5” feels like “Abbey Road.” It’s a sublime summing up, a movie that reflects the whole series in its magic mirror, and (just maybe) a perfect ending.
As the “Toy Story” films have evolved over 30 years, what’s emerged as their grand and bittersweet theme is the notion of loss. The sadness of it, but also the inevitability of it (so perhaps it’s not as sad as we first think). The toys, like the perpetually quarrelsome Woody and Buzz or Jessie the cowgirl, who now takes center stage, have seen their boy and girl owners grow up and leave them behind. That makes the toys feel almost like parents now, watching their children go off into the world. The movies deal with the specter of obsolescence — but also its happy twin, rebirth.
