If there’s any love story here, it’s about a boy, Andy, and his favorite cowboy doll, Woody. Their tender relationship is threatened when there’s a new sheriff in town — or in this case a space ranger action figure named Buzz Lightyear. Echoing the existential tones of children’s books like “The Velveteen Rabbit,” which questioned what it meant to be “real,” “Toy Story” wasn’t afraid to approach darker themes about the meaning of life.

When “Toy Story” writer Andrew Stanton pitched the idea to Tom Hanks in 1993, the actor expected this latest Disney film to follow the studio’s animated musical pattern. As he explained in a 2012 Ted Talk:

“So when we pitched Toy Story to Tom Hanks for the first time, he walked in and he said, ‘You don’t want me to sing, do you?’ And I thought that optimized perfectly what everybody thought animation had to be at the time. But we really wanted to prove that you could tell stories completely different in animation. So, we didn’t have any influence then, so we had a little secret list of rules that we kept to ourselves.”