Why do we keep going back to certain movies?

Picture a 40-year-old in a cinema, popcorn in hand, genuinely moved by an animated film. That’s the wonder of the classic family movies. While mostly marketed for children, they don’t leave the adults behind, and as we grow up, they only get better. That is the magic of the great family film, and it is about to happen again on a very large scale. This year, Shrek 5 and Toy Story 5, both arrive in theaters, and the anticipation surrounding them tells us something worth paying attention to; it’s not just about nostalgia, but about sharing and revisiting the memories we have around these classic films.

The architecture of a story that lasts

Not every film gets a sequel and most don’t deserve one. But certain stories embed themselves so deeply in cultural memory that they become less like entertainment and more like emotional infrastructure; as in, the framework through which entire generations process feelings of belonging, loss, growing up, and love.

What separates these films from the merely popular is their dual register. On the surface, Shrek is a fairy tale about an ogre who rescues a princess. Toy Story is about plastic toys that talk when no one’s looking. These are children’s premises; but underneath, they’re something far more complex. Shrek is about shame, the experience of being told you are too rough, too strange, too much, and finding people who see you anyway. The swamp isn’t just a location, it’s an analogy for a defense mechanism. That resonates both at age eight and at age 45, but in different ways.

Toy Story, meanwhile, is about obsolescence; it’s the creeping human fear that you will be replaced, forgotten, outgrown. When Woody watches Andy reach for Buzz instead of him, children see a toy being sad. Adults see every moment they have ever felt passed over. Both are real and both are what’s intended by the creators. 

This double register is extraordinarily rare and hard to manufacture, which is why so few franchises achieve it, and why the ones that do become permanent fixtures of our cultural memory.

Nostalgia is a relationship, not just a memory

When a new sequel arrives in theaters, many of the adults queuing up will have grown alongside these stories. The children who watched Buzz Lightyear declare himself a space ranger in 1995 are now in their 30s and 40s. Some of them will be bringing their own children. This experience is different; adult viewers are not just taking in a new plot and characters, but also remembering the film they first loved 20 years ago, and watching their child encounter it for the first time today. That experience is more than nostalgia; it carries a sense of inheritance, sharing something with the next generation.

This is what the great family stories have always done. Consider The Sound of Music, released in 1965 and still finding new audiences 60 years on, not because it is fashionable, but because it is sturdy. There is a scene early in the film where Maria teaches the Von Trapp children to sing on the staircase; their stiff, motherless reserve begins to crack note by note. It is a small moment that lasts barely five minutes in the epically long film, but it has made grown adults cry in living rooms across six decades. The film’s final scene, when seven children and their new stepmother follow their father across the mountains on foot, choosing dignity and autonomy over safety, carries an emotional weight that no amount of cultural distance has diminished. Its themes do not remain stuck in 1965, they connect with whomever is watching across the decades.

Why we return and why now

We return to these stories because while the world may be unpredictable, our favourite films are not. We know the toys will find their way home. We know the Von Trapps will cross the mountains. The outcome is not the point; the journey through a story you know so well, held by characters you love, inside a world that reliably delivers on its emotional promise, is an act of comfort so deep it never fails to be exciting. No matter how many times we’ve watched it. 

The appetite for these classics is not simply childhood fondness reasserting itself. It is a deliberate reach for something that has already proven to bring value to our lives. When done well, the sequels become safety anchors because they are familiar enough to trust, and new enough to inspire a renewed sense of hope.

Some things are made to last and the best classic family films know this. They build themselves to hold up not just for a season but for a lifetime, across generations, across circumstances. And then they wait, patiently, for you to need them again years and even decades later.