For Fans of Toy Story

Strip the animation and the premise: Sunnyside Daycare is a film about incarceration, corrupt authority, and an escape plan executed under near-impossible constraints. Lotso is a villain whose backstory is sympathetic until it isn't, which is more nuance than most live-action antagonists get. The furnace sequence near the end plays as genuine existential terror. The fact that it earned a G rating and a Best Picture nomination in the same year says something about what Pixar was doing that nobody else was.

Randy Newman's work across all four films functions less as scoring and more as emotional annotation. 'You've Got a Friend in Me' is a children's song that sounds like it was written for adults looking back. 'When She Loved Me,' performed by Sarah McLachlan in Toy Story 2, is a quiet ballad dropped into a children's film so unexpectedly that it reframes everything around it. Newman won the Oscar for 'We Belong Together' from Toy Story 3 after three previous nominations from the franchise. The music does not support the emotion. It is the emotion.

Most fans felt Toy Story 3 was a perfect ending. Pixar agreed, which is why making Toy Story 4 was the more interesting decision. Rather than inflate the stakes again, the fourth film turns inward: it is about Woody realizing his purpose does not have to be what it always was. Forky is the film's real argument, an object that has meaning simply because someone decided it did. Whether Toy Story 4 matches the emotional peak of 3 is genuinely debatable. That it chose a quieter, more personal ending rather than a grander one is not a flaw. It's the film taking its own premise seriously one more time.