Riley Andersen's move from Minnesota to San Francisco throws her mental control room into crisis when Joy and Sadness are accidentally flung from headquarters, forcing them to find their way back through the wreckage of her long-term memory. Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen's Pixar feature spends five personified emotions and a five-and-a-half-year production trying to dramatise, rather than explain, why a child needs to be allowed to feel bad.
Woody, no longer Bonnie's favourite toy, follows a homemade spork named Forky on a road trip and is reunited with the long-lost Bo Peep, who has built an independent life as a lost toy rather than an owned one. Josh Cooley, who replaced original director John Lasseter partway through a lengthy development process, uses that reunion to reopen a question Toy Story 3 seemed to have already settled: what a toy is actually for once being loved by a child stops being guaranteed.
A widower ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies to South America to fulfil a promise made decades earlier, only to find an uninvited child stowaway waiting on his porch. Pete Docter's 2009 film pairs one of animation's most quoted opening sequences with an adventure plot that keeps circling back to grief.