Commentary: A highly personal ranking of the 10 best toys in the 'Toy Story' movies

My daughter Katie loved to collect stuffed animals.It was something of an obsession, a harmless one, and we were happy to oblige.

By the time she was 8, the menagerie had become so huge that we needed to string up a net over her bed to free up some floor space.It was not unreasonable, then, for my wife to ask her one day if she might pick out 10 stuffed animals — old friends she no longer played with and who had been usurped in the pecking order — to give away.Katie agreed without protest.I listened to this conversation warily, all the while thinking: Why not just string up another net? As my wife tells the story (over the years, this has become family lore), sometime later she looked out the bedroom window into our backyard and spied me going through the trash, fishing out a threadbare lion, its once-mighty mane all but vanished.“Glenn, what are you doing?” she asked me.

“The child made her choice.”“But we used to play tea party with this,” I replied, rescuing the lion and bringing it back inside.I tell you this not to say that I was right — I wasn’t — but to tell you that nostalgia sometimes gets the better of me.Like Vito Corleone, I have a sentimental weakness for my children and I spoil them.So it won’t surprise you that the “Toy Story” movies, with their bittersweet themes about growing up and letting go, have a way of piercing my heart, making me wistful for playtime with plush toys on Sunday afternoons that seemed to stretch forever.With “Toy Story 5” arriving in theaters Friday, it felt like the right moment to revisit the earlier movies, take in the new one (which, like the fourth, is enjoyable enough but makes you appreciate the perfect journey the original trilogy delivered) and offer a personal ranking of my 10 favorite characters.

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