After the events of the original Toy Story, Woody gets accidentally torn by his owner, Andy, and thus, is put on a shelf where he may never get fixed. When Woody gets stolen by a greedy toy collector/toy store owner during a yard sale, Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the gang set out on an adventure to find him while Andy is away for camp. While Woody is away, though, he meets new friends and questions whether or not he should go back to his home, worried that he’ll eventually be forgotten the more Andy grows up.

First off, the leap in animation quality from both the original Toy Story as well as A Bug’s Life to this is pretty outstanding. Both of those previous Pixar films’ animation still very much holds up in my opinion, but I would say Toy Story 2 is the first film from the studio that really started to look like they were fully comfortable with 3D animation, and the first that I would say looks good by modern standards, and not just old ones. Even just looking at the lighting, but especially the humans, shows how much of an improvement they were able to make in just four years. There are even several shots (mostly in the dark) that look like they were animated today.

Narrative-wise, though, I think it’s very plausible to say that Toy Story 2 is definitely a bit of an emotionally richer film. Even with just the premise alone with Woody questioning going back or not, some of the scenes with the new toys, especially Jessie, the cowgirl companion to Woody, are when Pixar really started to dive into the more tear-jerky stuff. It’s not like the whole film is super emotionally resonant in that way throughout the entire thing, like something such as Finding Nemo or Up, but it’s sort of when Pixar started to get more into that sort of thing.

I think the humor in this sequel might be even funnier than the first as well. It’s another one of those animated films targeted for kids, where the older you get, the more you pick up on some of the jokes. There are some surprisingly dark and starting-to-get-adult-jokes that obviously don’t go into inappropriate territory, as this is a G-rated film after all, but really had me chuckling. I think the funniest jokes easily come from Rex.

I remember as a kid always liking this the most out of the three (at the time) Toy Story movies, simply because of how fun and climactic the third act was, even though I obviously didn’t know what a third act even was at that age. I definitely still think it’s one of the most fun sequences out of all the Toy Story movies simply for that reason. It stands out because it’s so much less “grounded” (not that the Toy Story movies are grounded anyway) than anything else from the other movies.

For the mixed, I definitely think that Toy Story 2 feels like it has the least importance and impact on this whole four-movie (soon to be five) story, which might be controversial with simply just the existence of Toy Story 4 and 5. What I mean by that, though, is that when you really think about it, this kind of just feels like a side quest Toy Story film, and not something that really propels the overall story or characters forward in a huge way. Don’t get me wrong, Woody definitely has a character arc here, but I think if you had to watch all of the Toy Story movies but had to skip one, this would definitely be it. The only thing that would make this a super necessary watch is that, well, not only is it really good, but Jessie is obviously introduced.

The one negative I have, as funny as it sounds for an hour and a half movie, is the pacing. It’s not bad or boring by any stretch of the imagination, but a lot of this movie can definitely feel like Woody is just stuck in his situation without much to do, while the rest of the toys are out to rescue him. Even though it is a negative, it’s still a very mild one simply for the fact that Woody still has a character arc during this time of the movie, and there are some emotionally heavy scenes.

Toy Story 2 might not be as good as the first, but it’s still a very fun, adventurous follow-up.