Toy Story 2

Essential, and the film where the series found what it is about. The first film asked whether a toy is loved. This one asks what happens afterwards, and the answer it gives is that every toy is eventually outgrown, that this is not a risk but a certainty, and that the only question is what you decide to do with the time before it.

That is delivered in the song, which arrives roughly halfway through and is the most direct thing in any Pixar film. Jessie's two minutes of being left on a roadside is the moment the franchise stops being a comedy about toys, and the fact that a children's film from 1999 is willing to simply sit in it, with no joke to release the pressure, is why people still talk about it.

Its production is famous twice over. It began as a direct-to-video sequel and was upgraded to a feature late, which meant most of it was rebuilt from scratch on a schedule of about nine months. Separately, a substantial portion of the work in progress was deleted from the studio's servers by accident and survived only because one employee had a copy at home, a story that has grown in the telling and is true in outline.

Against that it is the funniest entry: the toy-store sequence, the aisle of identical Buzzes, and Wayne Knight's Al are all better jokes than the first film has. Watch it directly after. It is the rare sequel that improves the film before it.