A sure bet to be enjoyed by all who enjoyed the first one. And endured by most others. The central theme of the built-in obsolescence of children's toys -- Woody, the pull-string cowboy, has suffered a torn shoulder and is retired to the shelf while his owner goes off to summer camp without him -- gives rise to some difficult, even painful, questions on aging, mortality, the instability of relationships, the impermanence of love, and the like. ("Do you really think Andy is going to take you to college? Or on his honeymoon?") The easy answers will doubtless be more soothing the younger you are. Parents, in consequence, are to be cautioned not for their kids' sake, but for their own sake. On another front, the advances in computer animation since the original Toy Story are plain to see, particularly in the depth of field (including at times an artificially blurry foreground), the openness and airiness of the space, and the lifelikeness of some of the human figures (all the way to nose hairs and a bad comb-over). Sometimes it is hard to know, or to remember, what you are looking at. This development, if you are old enough to be unsoothed by the aforementioned easy answers, is apt to be too fraught with misgivings and forebodings (where will it lead? where will it end?) to be entirely enjoyable. With the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Wayne Knight; directed by John Lasseter. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd