The third and presumably final Toy Story film picks up several years after the previous instalments. Andy is now 17, he's going off to college, he's maybe getting a little old for toys now... so what will become of them? This is a darker, more mature film than its prequels, dealing as it does with the threat of irrelevance - the spectre of not being cared about by those we once meant so much to. At the same time, of course, it's a kids' film about a bunch of toys having adventures, and the painful emotional themes at its heart never get in the way of the slapstick humour or the sometimes-scary action.
The toys find themselves at a daycare centre for young kids, where a Bill Cosby-ish bear named 'Lotso' Hugging' gives them a warm welcome and shows them around their shiny new home. What could possibly go wrong?
Visually, this is an even more beautiful film than its predecessors, inevitable technological advances making the animation that bit more convincing - the human characters in particular are no longer jarringly unrealistic, and the now-lumbering old dog's brief appearance is a delight.
It's possible I'm getting sappy in my old age, but I found the film perfectly pitched, pretty much the whole way through. The makers maybe risked laying things on a little bit thick towards the end, but for me, unlike so much Disney, they just about managed to stay on the heart-wrenching side of cheesy. I'm not sure when I last cried so much in a film.
Pixar have once again created a movie with surprising emotional depth and plenty of laughs even for quite small children, without talking down to anyone. Marvellous.