Toy Story 3

Essential, and it is the ending this story was always going to need. Eleven years passed between the second and third films, and the gap is written into the premise: Andy is seventeen, the toys have not been played with in years, and the entire plot is set off by the question of what to do with a box of things nobody uses.

The daycare is the best-constructed setting in the series. Sunnyside looks like a rescue and is a prison, run on seniority by a toy whose own abandonment turned him into an administrator, and the film is unusually precise about how institutions of that kind work: the newcomers are sent to the room where small children will destroy them, and the ones in charge explain that this is simply how it has always been.

The incinerator is the reason this film is remembered and it is worth being plain about what it does. For about forty seconds the characters stop struggling, take each other's hands, and accept that this is the end. There is no joke, no last-second escape from within the scene, and the rescue that follows is a coincidence the film makes no effort to dignify. Very few films aimed at children have ever gone that far.

The last five minutes are among the best endings in American animation, and they close the story completely. There is a real argument that the series should have stopped here, and anybody who wants to stop here has the better of it.