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Journey to lightyear1/18/2024 It’s all presented as the basic buy-in for the rest of the movie, which deals with Buzz’s refusal to accept the future he’s suddenly found himself in, and his struggle to let go of the past.Īs a Flash Gordon-style space adventure packed with fast-moving alien creepy-crawlies, snappy banter, and big explosive action, Lightyear is perfectly enjoyable. There’s nothing in that setup about how Buzz lives from one day to the next when he’s on the planet, or whether Alisha ever tries to talk him out of his obsessive space jaunts. Too much of it whips by as if there are no questions to be asked and nothing worth mentioning about the ship’s original mission or the society it came from, the time that passes between Buzz’s missions, or whether anyone starts questioning their worth before the hammer finally drops on them. That’s a lot to take in as just the scene-setting for the actual action of the film. The colonists move on as well, settling in on their new planet and adapting to it, until they finally decide there’s no point in devoting resources to Buzz’s ongoing mission. After every mission, most of which blur by in a quick montage, he returns to find Alisha older - first married to a woman she met while he was gone, then with young children, then adult children, and so forth. But because he approaches the speed of light in those missions, time passes more slowly for him than for the colonists he left behind. Obsessed with fixing his error, Buzz takes on a series of experimental missions to space to test new fuel crystals. The planet proves dangerous, and Buzz tries to pilot the ship to safety, but he miscalculates, damaging the fuel crystal that lets the ship enter hyperspace and leaving it stranded in hostile territory. When the ship is diverted to explore life signs on a planet en route to their final destination, Buzz and his commanding officer Alisha (Uzo Aduba) are thawed out to investigate. As the film opens, Buzz is part of a human mission into deep space, aboard a bulbous, turnip-shaped ship full of cryogenically frozen explorers. Which certainly explains some of its bigger ideas. (MacLane told Polygon in an interview that they ignored the previous Toy Story animated spinoff, 2000’s film and TV series Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.)īut those connections aside, Lightyear is meant to stand entirely on its own as an adult science fiction story rather than a movie primarily aimed at 6-year-olds like Andy. The bits and pieces of Lightyear’s arc implied throughout the Toy Story movies - like Buzz’s various pull-string catchphrases and the existence of his big purple robot enemy Zurg - were all elements Finding Dory co-director Angus MacLane and his co-writer Jason Headley ( Onward) had to deal with in plotting Lightyear. Toy Story’s toy version of Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen) is a piece of merch from the Lightyear movie, where Buzz is a human astronaut (voiced by the MCU’s Captain America, Chris Evans), part of an elite team of Space Rangers. It’s meant to be a fictional artifact from the Toy Story world: the favorite sci-fi movie of Toy Story’s central human character, Andy. Lightyear has a slightly complicated place in Pixar’s franchise thinking. But Lightyear takes such a disjointed, surface-level approach to the idea that it doesn’t land as powerfully as it should. That should be a resonant theme - certainly past Pixar movies, from Inside Out to Up to Coco to the original Toy Story, have drawn powerful narratives from the same message. But at heart, it links back to that core Pixar concept about opening up to other people as a first step toward finding a comfortable place in the world. Lightyear forges new ground for Pixar with an ambitious story built around a new alien world and a new human society, focusing on how one man deals with his own shortcomings and losses over the course of more than half a century of lost time. Arguably, Pixar’s strongest movies are about people (or toys, rats, robots, anthropomorphized emotions, etc.) figuring out how to accept who they are and how to live with each other. The idea that Pixar movies all boil down to “ What if had feelings?” does hold water, and given how much the studio built its name on the idea of evoking profound, powerful adult emotions in animated movies, it’s an understandable lens for viewing Pixar work.īut the studio’s new science fiction movie Lightyear suggests another way of looking at Pixar that’s a little less simple, but just as relevant. For the last seven years, one of the most popular critical analyses of Pixar Animation Studios movies has come from a Tumblr meme.
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