Perfect fourth

Nearly 25 years on from its immaculate birth, Toy Story — like Wagner’s Ring, like John Updike’s Rabbit novels — has become a tetralogy.

Do we need another one? Isn’t it time for Woody the toy cowboy to stuff that hat on a peg and stop hanging around kids? The short answer is no.  Though it springs fewer surprises, Toy Story 4 is still reliably fab. The animation now has such a painterly exactness it may as well be real rain/stubble/tarmac up there on screen. As for the cartoon characters, they project their own truth too, even the newest toy fashioned from a plastic fork-cum-spoon. ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to a spork,’ says Woody, nicely subverting Toy Story’s central idea that the imagination can take us all to infinity and beyond.

Amazingly there are still new stories to mine in the relationship between a child and its menagerie of playthings. This instalment brings us the theme of the midlife crisis — that critical tipping point when the solid citizen begins to feel the chill wind of his own irrelevance. It might not seem a sound premise for a movie aimed at ten-year-olds but that’s where Woody is at now. He and the gang are domiciled with Bonnie, last seen taking possession of Andy’s old toys as he headed to college. Poor old Woody is rarely plucked from the cupboard and his sheriff badge belongs to Jessie the cowgirl.

Then, on her first day at kindergarten, Bonnie wraps pipe-cleaner arms round a spork, glues on face and feet and christens the weird little figurine Forky. Forky is born with self-esteem issues – he believes his place is in the trash can — which gives Woody new purpose as a guardian. Then Forky throws himself out of the Winnebago, triggering a rescue mission.