Review: Lightyear (Angus MacLane, 2022)

Fig. 1 – Lightyear (Angus MacLane, 2022).

The critical and commercial resurgence of Walt Disney’s animation division since the company’s $7.4 billion purchase of Pixar Animation Studios nearly twenty years ago – crystallised by the global success of Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013) and recent hits like Moana (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2016) and Encanto (Jared Bush, 2021) – has coincided with a comparatively fallow period for its famous subsidiary. Against the backdrop of industrial turmoil and behind-the-scenes mismanagement (including the departure of John Lasseter due to sexual misconduct), Pixar’s computer-animated films over the last decade have been widely accused of “creative bankruptcy” (Orr 2017) given the studio’s progressive turn towards sequels, spin-offs, and franchise instalments. Whereas just one of Pixar’s first ten feature films was a sequel – the admittedly impressive Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter, 1999) – seven of the studio’s next twelve films were based on existing media properties. Beginning with Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010) and Cars 2 (John Lasseter, 2011), Pixar moved smoothly through its back catalogue for the sequels Finding Dory (Andrew Stanton, 2016), Cars 3 (Brian Fee, 2017), and Incredibles II (Brad Bird, 2018), while another Monsters University (Dan Scanlon, 2013) was the studio’s first prequel that plotted the origin story of Mike Wazowski and James P. ‘Sulley’ Sullivan.

By the time Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, 2019) hit cinema screens in June 2019, Pixar was very much defined by its evocation of past glories, whereas Disney had entered a so-called ‘Third Golden Age’ in which “progressivism and a commitment to inclusion are not only powerful artistic decisions but profitable business ones” (Harris 2016). In a piece provocatively titled “How Pixar Lost Its Way” that accompanied the release of Cars 3, The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr noted the studio’s 2006 purchase by Disney to become a part of the Mouse House had resulted in Disney having “rebounded,” while it was now Pixar inadvertently being cast “adrift” as the studio faced creative challenges to its storytelling supremacy with DreamWorks, Illumination, and Laika all waiting in the wings. As Orr noted, “The painful verdict is all but indisputable: The golden era of Pixar is over.”

Fig. 2 – Space Rangers Buzz Lightyear (Chris Evans) and best friend Alisha (Uzo Aduba).

All of which brings me to Lightyear (Angus MacLane, 2022) (Fig. 1), the studio’s most recent effort and a film that is both a prequel to their successful multimedia Toy Story (1995-2019) franchise, and yet strongly set apart from the earlier computer-animated trials and tribulations of Woody and Buzz. Despite media furore at the supposed re-casting of Tim Allen as Hollywood’s most famous Space Ranger in favour of Chris Evans (a move that journalists seem desperate to attribute to an insidious ‘woke agenda’ given Allen’s conservative politics), Lightyear is not about that Buzz, but the action figure’s cinematic inspiration. This makes Lightyear neither strictly a spin-off nor an origin story per se, but a fiction film that exists within the Toy Story universe. The parallels, then, to the narrative of Toy Story 2 are clear. While that 1999 sequel revealed Woody to be prized merchandise intended to tie-in with the fictional 1950s puppet television show “Woody’s Round-Up,” here we essentially learn that Buzz Lightyear started life as a live-action character (though the name of the actor playing Buzz is kept a secret…), who was quickly spun-off into a range of popular and profitable merchandise. Even Lightyear’s opening credits seek to shed light on the by announcing “In 1995, Andy got a toy from his favourite movie...this is that movie.”

Fig. 3 – Kiko (l), Alisha (r) and their new-born son.

Once the titles roll and the chronology of the film confirmed, Lightyear settles comfortably into its identity as a relatively formulaic space opera, one that playfully evokes in elements of its character designs and dialogue the pleasures of its ‘toys-come-alive’ predecessors, as well as canonical Hollywood science-fiction fare from Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) to Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). Events properly kick off with Buzz and best friend Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) (Fig. 2), who become marooned together on T’Kani Prime, a hospitable yet occasionally hostile planet (thanks to subterranean plant-like tentacles) located 4.2 million light years from Earth. Due to his stubbornness and failure to heed the advice of his ship’s on-board virtual AI system during the ill-fated mission to this new planet, a guilty Buzz relentlessly tests new energy sources that will enable both Space Rangers to escape T’Kani Prime’s intergalactic colony and return home with his crew to Earth. However, every 4-minute test-run conducted by the headstrong Buzz takes 4 years due to the effects of time dilation, meaning that while he only ages a matter of minutes on each journey, every return to Alisha (who is building aher own life on T’Kani Prime) sees her inevitably growing older. Repeatedly left behind as Buzz tries and fails to reach the necessary hyperspeed to escape, the now-ailing Alisha becomes a stark reminder that Buzz’s pursuit of happiness and persistent desire to right his wrongs (dressed up in his mind as “completing the mission”) comes at the expense of meaningful connection. In a montage showing Buzz returning from each unsuccessful test flight (essentially losing 4 years in the process), we see Alisha marry fiancée Kiko, bear a child, and become a grandparent all within the first 30 minutes (Fig. 3). Yet all are life events that pass Buzz by. One particular return after yet another failed attempt brings the terms of their relationship to a head – he enters Alisha’s office a final time to be greeted with empty walls and cleared desk. 62 years have elapsed, Alisha has passed away, and he’s missed it all.

Fig. 4 – Alisha’s daughter Izzy (Keke Palmer).

Against the orders of Alisha’s short-sighted replacement – the ‘by-the-book’ Commander Burnside (Isiah Whitlock Jr) – the reeling Buzz undertakes a final mission with the same outcome, yet upon his return a further 22 years have passed, and as a result he meets Alisha’s now-adult granddaughter, Izzy (Keke Palmer) (Fig. 4), a wannabe Space Ranger and the colony’s first line of defence against the recent invasion of Zyclops robots led by Emperor Zurg. Joining forces with inexperienced recruits Mo Morrison (Taika Waititi) and Darby Steel (Dale Soules), as well as robotic feline Sox (think Dug from Up [Pete Docter, 2009]) voiced by Peter Sohn, Buzz must attack and destroy Zurg’s ship, free the imprisoned colony that he left behind, and find that elusive way home.

There is much to admire in long-time Pixar animator Angus MacLane’s debut directorial film (though he co-directed Finding Dory, and helm a handful of the studio’s shorter Toy Story spin-off films). The time-travel plot is a nice change of pace, if indebted to the time heists and multiverses of madness for which another Disney subsidiary, Marvel (also featuring Evans, of course), is perhaps best known. Yet Pixar’s turn to science-fiction storytelling conventions for the first time since Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) provides Lightyear the opportunity to explore what it means to ‘connect’ with one another across both space and time. Indeed, if the earlier Toy Story 4 explored loss, protection, community, and the threat of change through the character of Woody, then Lightyear affords the same pleasures to the human Buzz, whose mildly toxic desire to do everything by himself at the start of the film is gradually softened as he embraces teamwork over leadership through his growing professional relationship with Izzy and her crew.

Fig. 5 – Buzz and his robotic feline Sox (Peter Sohn) join forces with Izzy, Mo Morrison (Taika Waititi) and Darby Steel (Dale Soules).

Evans’ casting is central to the character’s persuasiveness and appeal, and a necessary modification to the toy version of Buzz so famously embodied by Allen. The task facing Evans is a difficult one: to re-imagine and re-interpret one of contemporary Hollywood’s most recognisable animated characters, complete with catchphrases, and then to make him human. Yet he does so with aplomb, and in ways that give real emotional weight to Buzz’s relationship with both Alisha and, later, Izzy. Aduba and Palmer are standout too, though the former has to make the most of a role that is criminally underwritten and underdeveloped (I would have loved more scenes with Alisha and Buzz prior to their T’Kani Prime mission, and moments that played a bit more with their emergent connection across generations given Alisha’s rapid aging). Unfortunately, Lightyear feels more likeable and formulaic than ambitious and audacious. Aside from Buzz and the core group of supporting players (whose comic quips tend to grate too), other characters are rendered far too throwaway given their screen time, meaning audiences have to buy into the film’s main premise of camaraderie between figures that always feel just that bit too disconnected (Fig. 5). As a result, Buzz merely ends the film where he started, partnered with one or two capable others without any convincing sense he’s undergone the kind of radical personal transformation that everyone thinks he has. Furthermore, Lightyear’s frontier themes that propel its story and characters forward also seem hamstrung by the weight of nostalgia that is unavoidable given its subject matter. The reflexive nods made to the Toy Story films are certainly entertaining additions, but their presence invites several inevitable and unfavourable comparisons back in time with Pixar’s standout franchise that only reveal how Lightyear isn’t quite up to par.

Finally, a quick note on Alisha’s same-sex relationship with wife Kiko, which is sadly left so brief that it could be edited out supposedly for ‘time’ constraints (before it was reinstated by Disney), and yet apparently not brief enough for certain countries to refuse the film a release based on their punishable views on the LGBTQ+ community. In a world where “conversations around sexual orientation and gender identity” in schools – thanks to the controversial “Don’t Say Gay” legislation (to which Disney’s connections were widely condemned) (Romano 2022) – remain damagingly prohibited, Lightyear could have gone even further in exploring the meaningfulness of Alisha and Kiko’s union, rather than relegating it to a subtle clinch or two glimpsed by Buzz fleetingly through a doorway. But at a time when things are seemingly only labelled ‘political’ when they have the sheer audacity to be inclusive rather than merely tow the normativity line, a story about full-bodied White American exceptionalism (played by Captain America for goodness sake!) is deemed less politically-motivated than the image of Black same-sex couple who apparently have the misfortune of a) simply existing and b) loving each other.

With Pixar’s latest run of Soul (Pete Docter, 2020), Luca (Enrico Casarosa, 2021) and Turning Red (Domee Shi, 2022) all streamed direct to the Disney+ platform due to the pandemic, Lightyear was the first of the studio’s films since the urban fantasy Onward (Dan Scanlon, 2020) to obtain a theatrical release. As such, it should have been a welcome celebration of their triumphant big-screen return. Yet though MacLane’s film is sincere, against the studio’s more narratively creative features released online over the past two years (marked by racial and cultural diversity in its characters), Lightyear is ultimately a lightweight attempt at emotion that reaches for the sky but unfortunately doesn’t quite make it.

**Article published: July 8, 2022**

References

Harris, Aisha. 2016. “Moana Makes It Official: Disney Has Entered a Progressive, Inclusive Third Golden Age.” Slate. November 21. Available at: https://slate.com/culture/2016/11/with-moana-frozen-big-hero-6-and-zootopia-disney-has-entered-an-inclusive-third-golden-age.html.

Orr, Christopher. 2017. “How Pixar Lost Its Way.” The Atlantic (June). Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/how-pixar-lost-its-way/524484/.

Romano, Nick. 2022. “Pixar’s Lightyear director didn't realize same-sex kiss would be so ‘significant’ for audiences.” June 14, 2022. Available at: https://ew.com/movies/lightyear-director-pixar-first-same-sex-kiss/.

Biography

Christopher Holliday is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London, where he teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts and specializes in Hollywood cinema, animation history and contemporary digital media. He has published several book chapters and articles on digital technology and computer animation, including work in Animation Practice, Process & Production and animation: an interdisciplinary journal (where is also Associate Editor). He is the author of The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and co-editor of the collections Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2021). Christopher is currently researching the relationship between identity politics and digital technologies in popular cinema, editing a book on the multimedia performativity of animation (with Dr. Annabelle Honess Roe), and can also be found as the curator and creator of www.fantasy-animation.org.

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