Sorry, Pixar’s ‘Lightyear’ is a buzzkill
“In 1995, Andy got a toy from his favorite movie. This is that movie.”
So begins “Lightyear,” a new Pixar release that takes a meta approach to the animation studio’s flagship franchise. It isn’t a prequel to “Toy Story,” exactly, but instead presents the movie that inspired Buzz Lightyear toys in the first place. It’s a potentially clever bit of reverse engineering by the Walt Disney Co., which, after decades of growing merchandizing out of its films, has reversed course. We aren’t exactly through the looking glass, but we may be through the Happy Meal.
It’s honestly a gambit — taking a fictional movie-within-a-movie and making it real — that I’ve wanted to see attempted before. Who hasn’t watched “Seinfeld” and been curious to actually see “Rochelle, Rochelle” or “Sack Lunch”? Or those pseudo Adam Sandler movies like “Mer-man” in Judd Apatow’s “Funny People”? I’ve seen the “Home Alone” movies enough to almost convince myself that “Angels With Even Filthier Souls” is a real gangster flick.
But the truth is, the appeal of all these fauxfilm cameos — like those that adorn Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” — is predicated on their brevity. So should “Lightyear” have been a feature film or a Pixar short? The answer, I think, is very much the latter.
The “Toy Story” films, once an almost perfect trilogy, were already stretching toward infinity and beyond with
“Toy Story 4,” a nineyears-later-sequel that was perhaps propelled less by a need for narrative closure than it was box-office imperatives. But at the same time, Forky. Forky made it forgivable.
What’s compelling “Lightyear” is harder to say, but there is a bland, vaguely “Planes” feeling here that smacks of a straight-to-video spinoff. Yet unlike that “Cars” detour, “Lightyear” bears the Pixar imprimatur. And, ironically, it’s the first Pixar film in more than two years to debut exclusively in theaters. During the pandemic, “Luca,” “Soul” and “Turning Red” were all routed instead to Disney+, sometimes reportedly against the objections of Pixar’s own animators.
But “Lightyear,” helmed by “Finding Dory” co-director Angus MacLane (who made some of the “Toy Story” shorts and TV specials that have expanded the film series), arrives in theaters just as summer movies are reaching the stratosphere again. So it may be a bit of a buzzkill to call “Lightyear” — the biggest kids movie to come along in a while — a failed mission.
It’s a surprisingly selfcontained film — that opening title card is one of the only tethers to “Toy Story” — in which the “real” Buzz (drawn more human-like and voiced by Chris Evans, stepping in for Tim Allen), not the toy version, is marooned on a distant planet with fellow Space Ranger Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) and a spaceship full of people. Every time Buzz attempts to rocket into light speed to get help back on Earth, something goes wrong. Each trial takes a day but, back on the faraway planet, everyone else has lived through years. In a blip, Alisha (the first Black LGBTQ character in a major studio animated film) gets engaged, has a baby, sees her son graduate and grows old.