Toy Story

Essential, and still the tightest thing Pixar has made. Eighty-one minutes, two characters, one want each, and a plot in which everything that goes wrong is caused by somebody acting on exactly what you were told about them in the first ten minutes. It was the first fully computer-animated feature and that is the least interesting thing about it.

The premise that made it work is jealousy. Woody is not a hero with a problem, he is a favourite toy who organises his whole identity around being chosen, and when a better one arrives he does something indefensible about it. Pixar nearly lost the film over exactly this. A version screened for Disney in 1993 was shut down because Woody had been pushed into straightforward meanness, production stopped for months, and the script was rebuilt so that his cruelty came from fear rather than contempt.

The other half is Buzz, who is the only character in the film who does not know he is a toy, and whose arc is the discovery that he is a mass-produced object with no special properties. The commercial he watches in Sid's house is the single cruellest beat in the series, and the film gives him two full scenes to absorb it before anybody makes a joke.

What dates is the rendering of human skin and nothing else. The lighting, the staging and the cutting hold up completely, because they were done by people who had come out of short films and knew exactly how little they could afford to show. Start here.