Toy Story 2 Review

The received wisdom about sequels in animation is that they exist to extend a brand, not to deepen one. Disney built an entire direct-to-video division on that principle through the 1990s, cranking out follow-ups to The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, and Aladdin that were cheaper, shorter, and designed for a shelf at Blockbuster rather than a seat at a multiplex. The assumption baked into that model was that the original film had already done the creative work, and everything after was just harvesting. Toy Story 2 was supposed to be exactly that kind of film. The fact that it is instead one of the finest animated films ever made is either a miracle of institutional stubbornness or a testament to what happens when a studio refuses to accept its own worst instincts. Probably both.

Woody (Tom Hanks) is accidentally left behind during a yard sale and stolen by Al (Wayne Knight), a toy collector who recognises him as a rare piece from a 1950s television show called Woody's Roundup. Held in Al's apartment awaiting sale to a Japanese toy museum, Woody meets the rest of the Roundup gang: Jessie (Joan Cusack), the enthusiastic cowgirl with a buried history of loss; Bullseye, the loyal horse; and Stinky Pete the Prospector (Kelsey Grammer), who has never been opened and has very specific reasons for wanting to keep it that way. Meanwhile, Buzz (Tim Allen) leads a rescue mission through the city to bring Woody home before Andy returns from camp. Estelle Harris, John Ratzenberger, and Don Rickles also star.

The production history is inseparable from what makes the film extraordinary. Toy Story 2 was greenlit by Disney as a direct-to-video release while Pixar was simultaneously in production on A Bug's Life, which meant the sequel was being developed by a secondary team under conditions that would have been generous to describe as ideal. When John Lasseter and the core Pixar leadership saw what they had roughly nine months before the theatrical release date (the film had since been promoted to cinemas), they made the decision to scrap the majority of it and start over. What followed was one of the most intense production sprints in the history of the medium, with the studio essentially rebuilding the film from the ground up while A Bug's Life was completing its own release cycle. There is a version of this story where the pressure destroys the film. Instead it produced something that is tighter, more emotionally ambitious, and structurally cleaner than the original.

The reason it works is that Lasseter and his co-directors Lee Unkrich and Ash Brannon understood that a sequel to Toy Story had to be about something the original had not yet had to confront: what it means to be replaced. The first film asked whether Woody could accept that Andy's affections were not exclusively his. Toy Story 2 asks a harder question, whether a toy's love for a child is worth anything if the child will eventually outgrow it. Jessie's backstory, delivered in a sequence set to Sarah McLachlan's "When She Loved Me," is as quietly devastating as anything Pixar has ever produced, and it functions not as an emotional detour but as the film's entire thesis. Woody's choice at the end of the film carries weight precisely because the film has done the work of making the alternative genuinely appealing. To be clear, this is not a film that simply raises the question and gestures at it. It earns its answer.

Stinky Pete is also a better villain than he is usually given credit for. His motivation is comprehensible in a way that most animated antagonists are not. He has never been played with, has spent his entire existence sealed in packaging, and has arrived at a worldview shaped entirely by that deprivation. There is something almost tragic about him, right up until the moment the film decides he does not deserve your sympathy, and that pivot is handled precisely. Kelsey Grammer brings enough warmth to the early scenes that the turn registers as a genuine betrayal rather than a reveal the film was building to all along.

On the level of craft, it is worth noting that this film was made simultaneously with A Bug's Life at a studio that had, at the time, significantly fewer resources than it would have a decade later. The opening Buzz Lightyear video game sequence, Woody's rooftop climb over a busy intersection, the airport climax: these are sequences that hold up against anything Pixar has produced since, and they were pulled off under conditions that, by most accounts, pushed the studio's workforce to its limit. That the film never shows those seams is its own kind of achievement.

If there is a caveat, it is that the middle section, Al's apartment, occasionally loses momentum in a way the film's opening and closing acts do not. The dynamic between Woody and the Roundup gang is interesting enough, but the film is clearly more alive when Buzz's rescue mission is on screen, and the crosscutting occasionally highlights the disparity. It is a minor structural complaint about a film that otherwise runs like clockwork.

At the end of the day, Toy Story 2 is the clearest argument in Pixar's filmography that the studio's best work happens when creative ambition and institutional resistance collide and the creatives win. It should not exist in the form it does. It was supposed to be a bargain-bin release built on a secondary budget with a fraction of the talent that made the original. That it emerged as not just a worthy sequel but the rare follow-up that genuinely expands on what its predecessor was doing is a function of Lasseter's refusal to release something he did not believe in, and a studio culture that, at least in that moment, backed him. Hopefully that lesson is not lost on whatever version of Pixar is making films a decade from now.