The Polar Express expands Chris Van Allsburg's picture book about a boy's magical Christmas Eve train ride to the North Pole into a full performance-captured feature, using Tom Hanks in six separate roles. Directed by Robert Zemeckis for Castle Rock Entertainment on the highest budget ever given an animated film at the time, it grossed $311 million but drew mixed reviews, with critics divided over its motion-capture human faces.
Toy Story follows Woody, a cowboy doll who becomes territorial once space ranger toy Buzz Lightyear replaces him as a boy's favourite. John Lasseter directed the first entirely computer-animated feature and the first film produced by the newly founded Pixar, working from a script substantially rewritten after Disney rejected early story reels as too flat. Made on a $30 million budget under a deal that gave Disney full ownership of the characters, the film earned $373.6 million and became the first animated feature nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Toy Story 2 has Woody stolen by a toy collector who plans to sell him to a Tokyo museum, forcing Andy's other toys into a rescue mission while Woody weighs eternal preservation against a childhood that will end. Originally planned as a direct-to-video cash-in, it was rebuilt into a theatrical Pixar film on a compressed nine-month schedule, going on to gross $497 million against a $90 million budget and a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.
Andy leaves for college and his toys are accidentally donated to a daycare centre ruled by a resentful stuffed bear. Lee Unkrich's 2010 conclusion to the Toy Story trilogy pushes the franchise's premise, toys who fear abandonment, to its most literal extreme.
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.