Lightyear

“From Disney and Pixar comes an animated sci-fi action-adventure – the definitive origin story of Buzz Lightyear (voice of Chris Evans), the hero who inspired the toy. Lightyear follows the legendary Space Ranger on an intergalactic adventure alongside ambitious recruits, Izzy, Mo and Darby, and his robot companion Sox. As this motley crew embark on their toughest mission yet, they must learn to work as a team to escape the evil Zurg and his dutiful robot army who are never far behind.”

It’s hard to imagine that it’s been almost 27 years since Toy Story was released, introducing us Woody and Buzz Lightyear for the first time, and setting up a world in which toys could talk and interact with each other that would entertain us for what is soon to be three decades. While Pixar has gone and done some incredible things since the first film, their most recent, Lightyear, is interesting in the fact they have made it sort of an origin story for the character. Although it isn’t exactly an ‘origin’ story per se, but the movie the toy is based on, the character in this film has quite a lot in common with its toy counterpart, especially a propensity for adventure.

Lightyear opens as we’re introduced to Buzz Lightyear (Chris Evans) and his team who are awakened from hyper-sleep to investigate potential life signs on an alien planet. Discovering them to be hostile, they attempt to escape but Buzz’s inability to accept help from others causes them and thousands of crew members to become stranded. Desperate to take sole responsibility for the mistake and save everyone, Buzz volunteers for space flights to test the stability of hyperspace crystals they will need to achieve the speeds to reach home. Each test comes with a cost. As he approaches hyper-speed, time dilation causes minutes that pass for him to be years back on the planet, four years for each flight. Buzz sees his friends move on with their lives, have families, accept their surroundings, while he continues to pursue his own need to rectify his mistake.

One of the major differences between Toy Story and Lightyear are the tones of the films. Obviously, Toy Story was geared more toward children and themes they could understand. Lightyear delves into a lot more adult themes and quite honestly the majority of the subject matter is as well. I don’t know a lot of six-year-old children interested in the theory of relativity or time dilation and able to grasp the concept from a five-minute montage of Buzz slingshotting himself around a star over and over. This is where I believe a lot of people thought Pixar and Disney got it wrong. While that’s definitely subjective, I can understand the criticism. Lightyear was supposed to be the film that Andy saw before he was six that made such a big impression on him. With all these adult themes about family, loss, and learning to accept help from others, the reality of bringing children of that same age to see this and hope for that same excitement, or at the very least the same excitement as Toy Story, could be disappointing. It’s much more serious, with concepts and a genre that honestly young children just might not enjoy. That being said, I tend to look at the film as made for those of us who did see the original films in theaters, who did feel the magic of toys coming to life, now older, literally seeing our lives fly by at what seems the speed of light. These themes are for us, and will be for our children when they get older. The film could have had some better marketing to perhaps paint a better picture of this, or just not try and connect it with Toy Story like it did. Regardless, for me, at this age, it was an enjoyable film with some themes that hit pretty close to home.

While Buzz is certainly the main character, the one who steals the show is by far and away Sox (Peter Sohn), the robotic cat able to produce just about any tool needed, in a cat-like fashion, to get out of a dangerous situation. These sequences may be the best ones for kids that they will surely enjoy, but it was also the best ones for me too. The film may be light on humor, but this was a welcome addition to some of the heavier themes of the film, and while I did want to see more of him, I’m also glad they didn’t overuse it and run it into the ground like films most certainly can do with characters they expect to be loveable, cute, comic-reliefs.

We were given a digital code to review this film, which is now available to stream on Disney+. The physical copy doesn’t come out until the September 13^th on 4k Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD, which will hopefully be packed full of extras, with superior video and audio, something that cannot be accurately reviewed based on internet connections. With the trend of Disney limiting what streaming content of theirs gets released on physical media, seeing this on the press release is a welcomed sight.

Check this one out now on Disney+ and other paid streaming services, and if you enjoy it, grab the physical copy on September 13^th!