People tend to praise Toy Story for its animation. And fair enough – in 1995, the gleam on Buzz’s helmet did look like witchcraft. But strip away the pixels and what you’re left with is the finest ensemble comedy of the decade: a workplace sitcom that happened to be set in a toy box.

The real magic was never any single character – it was the chemistry between all of them. Woody, the anxious foreman forever trying to keep everyone calm. Buzz Lightyear, the swaggering new recruit convinced he’s the hero of a far more important film. Rex, fretting; Hamm, deadpan; Mr Potato Head, lobbing insults like a man who’d be lost without an audience. They squabbled like colleagues and loved one another like family, which is to say constantly, reluctantly and without ever quite admitting it.

What lifts the films above mere nostalgia is that the laughs and the lump in the throat come from the same source – a band of mismatched friends who keep showing up for each other. When Woody risks everything to drag Buzz home, or when the whole gang links arms and slides together toward what looks like the end, what you feel isn’t sadness, it’s the relief of watching people flatly refuse to leave anyone behind. That’s the trick. These were never films about loss. They were films about loyalty.

Thirty years on, the gang reassembles for Toy Story 5, in cinemas from 19 June. The roll call is happily intact: Tom Hanks as Woody, Tim Allen as Buzz and Joan Cusack as Jessie, who steps into a bigger leadership role this time, alongside Tony Hale’s Forky, Wallace Shawn’s Rex, John Ratzenberger’s Hamm, Annie Potts’ Bo Peep, and the rest of the gang, right down to Keanu Reeves’s gloriously fragile Duke Caboom.

The new threat is, predictably, Lilypad, a frog-shaped smart tablet voiced by Greta Lee that muscles into the life of eight-year-old Bonnie, who has her own ideas about what counts as play. There’s a bunch of new guest characters, voiced by Alan Cumming and Bad Bunny, among others, and even a new Taylor Swift song written for Jessie.

But the real reason three generations will pile into the cinema once again is the same thing that was there at the start: the warmth of watching a crowd of misfits choose each other, screen or no screen. We don’t come back for the gadget. We come back for the gang – for the cheerful, ridiculous, genuinely uplifting spectacle of friends who simply will not let go. And that, reassuringly, is the one thing no tablet can replace.

It would be remiss, too, not to acknowledge the gang’s other great legacy: their wardrobe. For toys, they have remarkable range. Woody has spent 30 years proving that western tailoring never truly leaves us. Buzz is a one-man argument for technical outerwear. Duke Caboom is doing more for the 1970s than most front rows. So, as we would for any bona fide style icon, we’ve done the decent thing and worked out how you, too, can get the look from this season’s men’s collections.