It’s hard to pick Pixar’s best movie, but it’s easy to say when their streak of almost unbeatable movies ended. Toy Story 3 was the last flawless movie they made (until Inside Out and, even later, Coco). It’s perhaps the best in the trilogy, and cements the franchise as one of the best trilogies of all time (alongside Star Wars and LOTR). Nobody would have predicted this in 1995.
Outside of Up, I will never cry more in any other movie. Changing the parameters of the film from a road movie to an escape film keeps things fresh, but what really sells the movie is the elevated sense of stakes. Real death is on the table this time, and Sunshine Daycare is the purgatory on the way.
The first film is about childhood and belonging. Toy Story 2 is about adulthood and identity. And 3 is about death, and reckoning with our own inescapable mortality.
Plus, it’s got Spanish Buzz. 12⁄10.