Lightyear (aka Sad, Strange Little Man)

In mid-2022, former Simpsons showrunner Mike Reiss tweeted something that really stuck with me. It was in reference to DreamWorks' Animation's latest, The Bad Guys, and how reminiscent it was of one of "those fun movies" that Pixar used to do before they started trying to "teach us the meaning of life" all the time. I still think he was only partially right. Whatever its merits, I wouldn't say that anything about The Bad Guys particularly recalls Pixar's early works (The Bad Guys is a full-on farce, more comparable to, say, The Emperor's New Groove than anything in Pixar's canon). Furthermore, at the time he made that tweet Pixar's most recent feature was Turning Red, and I'd wondered if it really deserved that knock. Or Luca before it for that matter. Both were charming, achingly personal coming of age stories with light fantasy twists and simple, unassuming messages about embracing your inner self (and resisting generational trauma, which is the prevailing concern in contemporary animation). Not necessarily everyone's cup of tea, but definitely not the kind of material that obviously warranted the specific snarky charge that Reiss had levelled against them. I was, for a time, inclined to dismiss it as a variation on those mindless remarks made by fellow Simpsons alumni Mike Scully in the 2000 documentary Wallace & Gromit Go Chicken about how animation was inherently better suited to comedy than to drama, just phrased in a more amusing way. Then Lightyear hit, and Reiss's words suddenly gained a wad of retroactive credence. If ever there was a Pixar feature that had busted had its body under the weight of wanting to say something grand and important, it was the Toy Story spin-off purporting to be the origin story of everyone's favourite upstart space toy. Lightyear is the very definition of a film that desperately wants to teach us the meaning of life when it should have been having fun. And yet here's the really goofy thing about it - I can safely say that I've had more fun with Lightyear than I have any other Pixar film from the 2020s. I do not intend that as an insult. With the exception of Onward, I've enjoyed just about every Pixar feature this decade has yielded thus far. It's just that Lightyear is the one I've found myself reaching for time and time again. Objectively, I don't think it's a good film, but I am fascinated by it nevertheless. I feel the insatiable urge to keep revisiting it, to pick over its every baffling and misguided decision, to marvel that a film so mind-bogglingly misconceived ever came to being.

Lightyear is one of those movies that exists purely to be made fun of. Although let me be clear about this one thing - hate watching is not an idea we promote on this blog. My mockery comes squarely from a place of affection. For as ridiculous as Lightyear is, and as feverishly reluctant as I am to accept this as an authentic part of Toy Story canon, it is a movie that's won my heart. It's wretchedly dorky mess, and I guess I relate to that on some level.

What Lightyear is not is a movie about the plucky action figure voiced by Tim Allen. This is a movie about the "real" Buzz Lightyear, the intrepid space explorer that toy Buzz was initially deluded into thinking was himself, voiced here by Chris Evans. This is where it lost an awful lot of people, who couldn't get their heads around the idea that there was this other version of the character, leading an entirely separate existence to the toy Buzz. Many of them heard the term "origin story" and were even more lost ("He was made in Taiwan! What more is there to say about the origins of a toy?"). The trailers did an amazingly bad job of communicating it, but this is allegedly the film within the Toy Story universe that prompted Buzz action figures to be manufactured in the first place. Allegedly. 

Released in June 2022, Lightyear was intended to be Pixar's triumphant return to the big screen, after the Covid pandemic had prompted Disney to dump a couple of years' worth of the studio's slate directly onto Disney+, even during periods when cinemas were fully operational. Lightyear should have been a safe bet, given the strength of the Toy Story brand, but it raked in surprisingly weak box office numbers, amassing a worldwide total of £226 million - a steep drop from the billion plus grosses the more recent Toy Story installments had enjoyed. There was a lot of talk in the aftermath about what was to blame, with certain outlets being all-too eager to attribute the film's failure to the presence of a brief lesbian kiss, but I doubt that was the biggest factor here. As I see it, the problems Lightyear had to contend with were threefold. First, there was general debasement of the Pixar brand caused by the aforementioned decision to send Soul, Luca and Turning Red directly to streaming, and not even as those Premier Access titles you had to pay extra for (I'm of the opinion that Disney used the pandemic as an excuse to prioritise their streaming service, and they did their pals at Pixar particularly dirty in the process). If audiences weren't convinced that this was a big event movie they had to rush out and see RIGHT NOW, they'd been conditioned to expect new Pixar titles to show up on Disney+ before very long. Which leads us into our second problem - Lightyear had a confusing and unimaginative marketing campaign that did not make it clear, to the casual viewer, what this version of Buzz had to do with the character they knew from the four Toy Story films. The third problem was the most sadly inevitable, which is that Lightyear was a misconceived project from the go. It isn't a question of what went wrong. On a conceptual level, pretty much nothing about it went right. Pixar's Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter basically conceded as much when he was asked to reflect on the film's failure a year later: "We asked too much of the audience. When they hear Buzz, they’re like, great, where’s Mr. Potato Head and Woody and Rex? And then we drop them into this science fiction film that they’re like, What?”

To be fair, the idea of wanting to go back and explore Buzz's origins as a science fiction hero isn't the most illogical line of thinking. The original Toy Story did make it fairly obvious that Buzz Lightyear was based on some kind of pre-existing property within its universe, but never elaborated on what exactly, beyond the ultra-vague premise of Buzz needing to protect his galaxy from the advancements of the evil Emperor Zurg. We knew there was a "real" Buzz Lightyear, and that Andy and his friends had completely lost their minds over him, we just never got to see him first-hand (this is in stark contrast to Woody, whose origins in the beloved mid-century puppet show Woody's Roundup were clearly explained in Toy Story 2). It remained a loose end in Toy Story world-building, a mysterious franchise within a franchise that Pixar always had viable scope to expand on. I just think that director Angus MacLane wrong-footed himself straight out the gate in assuming that Andy had seen a movie, and what's more, a movie that was effectively his world's equivalent of Star Wars. I don't know about you, but that possibility had never once crossed my mind. My assumption was that Buzz Lightyear had started out as a character in a Saturday morning cartoon show, the kind that could very feasibly get kids like Andy hooked and wanting to buy a lot of merchandise, but likely wasn't anything prestigious.

Adding to the confusion was that some fans thought we already had a canon answer, by way of the 2000 animated series Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, which was explicitly framed as being the in-universe basis of the character. It's important to keep in mind that while Pixar provided the introductory sequence, with the Toy Story gang watching it from Andy's room, it was primarily a Walt Disney Television Animation production, and didn't necessarily represent how Pixar would choose to portray the fictitious Buzz Lightyear franchise on their own terms. I confess I never got into it, so I can't comment on how well it worked as its own thing (it was made by the same team who later did Kim Possible, one of Disney's better shows from the early 00s, so I'd expect it to at least be decently entertaining), but from the outset the existence of such a series really did make it look as though Disney weren't in on the original joke. Let's be serious - when toy Buzz recited his marketing blurb to Andy's toys ("As a member of the elite Universe Protection Unit of the Space Ranger Corps, I protect the galaxy from the threat of invasion from the evil Emperor Zurg, sworn enemy of the Galactic Alliance!") did you really think, "Sounds riveting, I wish I were watching that right now"? Or did you think that it sounded cookie cutter as hell and you knew everything about it you would ever need to know? That the "real" Buzz Lightyear should remain a total non-entity, while Buzz the toy was the one we got to know and accept as the genuine article seemed very much the point. When Woody taunts Buzz by asking if he thinks he's "real Buzz Lightyear"...well, it ends up becoming its own piece of charming irony. And while it would be a mite hypocritical for Pixar to have gone overly hard on this next point (they'd allied themselves with Disney, so they must have known what was coming), it was also easy enough to detect a slight critique of consumerism in the way Andy's infatuation with the character made him want to own everything Lightyear-related and essentially reshape his identity around him (to the point that he temporary abandoned the older values embodied in his attachment to Woody). "What did Andy see?" IS a valid question, but nothing within the Toy Story films indicates that it should be approached with anywhere near the degree of reverence as it is in Lightyear.

But that reverence is one of the things that most kills me about Lightyear. The film is so ridiculously earnest about everything it's doing, to the extent that it's almost heartbreaking. Based on MacLane's previous writing and directorial credits, which consisted of the Toy Story shorts Small Fry (2011) and Toy Story of Terror! (2013), I wouldn't have seen it coming. He had the potential to write something far goofier, and far better fitting with the details of the mother franchise, and and instead he chose to make this a sincere love letter to cinema and its ability to awaken the senses and imagination of those experiencing it early in life. He wanted to retroactively make Andy's Buzz obsession a vessel for the same kind of awe and wonder he felt after seeing Star Wars as a child. A lot of people were quick to dismiss this project as a straight-up cash grab, but I genuinely can't do that, since MacLane's passion is so palpable throughout, and there's something very warm, sweet and even admirable about it. I don't doubt for a second that the man loves the science-fiction genre and cared about creating a self-contained adventure for Buzz that treated said genre with the utmost respect. I just think that passion was mismatched with this particular project. It's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's disarming, but it also contributes to the film's weirdly (and delectably) confused tone.

For an idea of how confused the film is, we only need to look to its opening title card, which contains a concise and effective link between the respective worlds of Toy Story and Lightyear (more than the trailers ever managed), but also a massive error of judgement that will fundamentally cripple the picture for the full 105 minutes: "In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favorite movie. This is that movie." On the one hand, there is something very charming in its evocation of Pixar's beginnings, and the implication that the following film should be taken as not merely as an origin story for the character of Buzz, but for our relationship with the studio as a whole. The reference to 1995, in lieu of a more direct shout-out to Toy Story, seems designed to take the thirtysomethings in the audience (likely to be there with kids of their own) back to the experience of seeing Pixar's debut for the first time, and to the wondrous possibilities it opened up, both as the first 3D animated feature, and as the dawn of an innovative voice in Hollywood animation. It takes advantage of the fact that Toy Story, like Star Wars, was a film that changed cinema (for better or for worse), in a bid to have the viewer feel an immediate connection with Andy's enthusiasm, by reminding of us of our own excitement in getting to know Andy and his toys for the first time. The title card, coupled with Michael Giacchino's swelling score (did they miss a trick in not using "Also Sprach Zarathustra" for this one moment?), anticipates that seeing Lightyear will be akin to finding a missing piece of a puzzle, an integral aspect of Toy Story canon that's been lying dormant all these years, just waiting to be picked up and to reveal the fuller picture of how the world we know and love came together. It wants to take us back to the thrill of experiencing cinema through young eyes and discovering what it has to offer, with the awareness that we might now be instilling that same sense of discovery in our own children. That reference to 1995 carries so much potency. Unfortunately, it also ends up being one of the film's single greatest undoings. By connecting Lightyear to such an explicit point in cinema history, it engenders a set of expectations that the film itself has no intention of delivering on, which is to say that this will be a throwback specifically to the blockbusters of the 1990s. It does seem mighty unfair to evoke the nostalgia of those of us who remember 1995, and who cut our own cinemagoing teeth attending the films of that very era, and to not go whole hog with it.

Alas, there is good as nothing in Lightyear beyond the title card to discernibly connect it to the trends and zeitgeist of the 1990s. Some critics suggested that Sox, the name given to Buzz's robotic feline sidekick, was a contemporary reference to presidential cat Socks, but if you ask me that's grasping at straws (psst...Socks is a very common name for a cat with paws coloured differently to its body; I'm pretty sure this had nothing to do with the Clintons). And, speaking of Sox, what exactly is he supposed to be within the pretence of this being a live action production in Andy's universe? What special effects would have been used to render such a character in 1995? Crappy 90s CGI? An animatronic? A real cat with metallic dust sprinkled over its fur and with digitally added lip flaps (I mean, Babe had managed to pull off the latter in 1995)? Lightyear never lets on. It's so committed to upholding the reality of its internal world that it takes barely any time to explore its possibilities as a pastiche. Compare this to the sheer lovingness with which those brief snippets of Woody's Roundup were brought to life in Toy Story 2. The visible strings on the puppets. The unabashed silliness of the gags. It took itself much more lightly, and yet it had considerably more conviction and credibility as a slice of Toy Story world-building. (The marketing for Lightyear likewise missed a golden opportunity; think how much fun they could have had recreating the way trailers were put together in the 1990s. You know what I'm saying here - they should have brought back the voice-over guy!)

Odie Henderson, reviewing the film on Roger Ebert's site, potentially saw something that I didn't: "Director Angus MacLane and his co-writer, Jason Headley do a very good job gently mocking the type of space movie that would have existed in the 1990s." Thing is, I can't help but feel that Henderson immediately undermines that point by citing a list of visible influences on Lightyear, NONE of which are from the 90s: Star Wars: Return of The Jedi (1983), Avatar (2009), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Last Starfighter (1984). Because how many iconic space-bound sci-fi adventures came to being in the 90s anyway? It wasn't exactly a golden age for the genre. Obviously the Star Wars special editions don't count, and The Phantom Menace didn't make it until the very tail-end of the decade. Before then, I remember going to see precisely one space movie, the big screen adaptation of Lost in Space from 1998. How prophetic the title wound up being. It was a film that went absolutely nowhere (in terms of both its internal narrative and its cultural impact), and that nobody other than myself now remembers (their loss? Maybe? We'll pick this up in another entry...). It is nevertheless my default yardstick for what a space movie that existed in the 1990s would have looked like. Bombastic, choc full of special effects that have aged hideously, and so desperate to sell itself as macho when it is so very, very camp. I suspect Henderson picked up on Lightyear's own palpable eagerness to be taken seriously and assumed it was part of the joke. It was no joke at all.

The dead giveaway occurs in the first act, which is the one where Pixar is most conspicuously straining to teach us the meaning of life and, in fairness, also happens to be the film's strongest. We open with Buzz heading out with his fellow space rangers to explore an uninhabited planet, and accidentally damaging the Star Command vessel, getting the 1200-strong crew stranded in this unknown world. Buzz becomes obsessed with righting the wrong, devoting all of his time to the testing of a highly unstable hyperspace fuel that could potentially get them home, while the rest of the crew makes peace with their situation and establishes a thriving colony. Every time Buzz goes into hyperspace, he ages only minutes but returns to the colony to find they've had a good few years in his absence. Time dilation, you rascal. If this is all sounding oddly familiar to you, it might be because it's essentially the same scenario as the Michael Radford short, "Addicted To The Stars", in which Daniel Craig plays an astronaut who ages only ten minutes up in space while some 80 years have passed on Earth, and reacquaints with his son, now in his 90s. The main difference is that Buzz, unlike Craig's character, only loses four years at a time and has ample opportunities to give up and become an active part of the terrestrial community, much like his commanding officer Alisha (Uzo Aduba), who finds love, gets married, raises a son and becomes a grandmother all while Buzz is popping in an out of hyperspace. He bears witness to these developments from an angle in which he only gets the highlights, not the lived reality. (Side-note: I wince every time I hear Buzz say, "You got engaged to someone you just met?", because it sounds like one of those bad attempts at self-aware humor that modern Disney is so fond of inserting into their own films.) Inevitably, there comes the mission where Buzz arrives back to find Alisha gone. She has, however, left a hologram message through which to say her goodbyes. "Sorry I won't be there to see you finish the mission," she tells Buzz. "To infinity.." She extends a trembling hologrammatic finger. "And beyond," Buzz mournfully responds, meeting her finger with his own. The moment is played with such thoroughgoing seriousness, as is most of the material involving Buzz's peripheral relationship with the colony (but for the welcome comic relief facilitated by the introduction of Sox the robot cat, voiced by Peter Sohn). But I fear the attempt to reconfigure Buzz's most iconic line into a more poignantly profound statement about the nature of life and death couldn't help but harpoon it. There are several points throughout the script where Buzz recites classic snippets of dialogue from his Toy Story counterpart, repurposed for a brand new context, and while this largely comes off as a cute (if distracting) touch, in this instance it's wholly detrimental. "To infinity and beyond!" might be the dialogue we most associate with Buzz, but it is, by design, goofy as hell, the kind of catchphrase you'd expect to hear spouted by a broader, more bombastic hero. Because Buzz is, by design, kind of an inherently goofy character. This evocation of his inherent goofiness really takes me out of the moment, and I'm snickering when I should be in floods of tears.

Still, I did say that the film's first act was its strongest, and there is a sliver of poetic beauty in that sequence where we see Alisha's life play out from Buzz's perspective, in breathtaking motion. It captures something of the ephemeralness of life, and the wonderful things that will pass you by if you can't figure out how to embrace them in the moment. Of course, it's also very reminiscent of something Pixar had already accomplished, in their 2009 film Up, in which we see Carl and Ellie's married life whizz by in just a few minutes, with all the grand plans they'd made while they were young not being realised (at least not in the way Carl had always anticipated). Heck, it's also got shades of the "When She Loved Me" sequence in Toy Story 2 (which is still, for my money, the single most emotionally devastating sequence Pixar has ever crafted), where Jessie witnesses Emily growing up while she stays the same and inevitably gets left behind. The sequence in Lightyear suffers by comparison, but it's not without its own quiet power.

It's also where the movie peaks. Buzz learns that Alisha's successor, Cal (Isiah Whitlock Jr), does not intend to authorise any further hyperspace missions, believing the colony is safe where it is. This comes just as Sox, who has dedicated Buzz's continuous stretches of absence to conducting his own research, has finally figured out how to keep the fuel stable. The authorities apparently decide that Sox's newfound knowledge is a threat and decide to have him terminated. Upon hearing this, Buzz grabs Sox and escapes into hyperspace with him. They arrive back twenty-two years into the future to find the colony under siege from a mysterious army of evil robots, who communicate using only one ominous word: "Zurg". On the outside, Buzz and Sox encounter an inexperienced defence fighter named Izzy (Keke Palmer) who transpires to be the grown up granddaughter of Alisha, and has aspirations of following in her grandmother's space ranging footsteps, despite suffering from a crippling astrophobia. Izzy introduces Buzz to her two teammates, Mo (Taika Waititi), a chaotic Kiwi with no threshold for stress or danger, and Darby (Dale Soules), a tech-savvy convict whose participation in in the defence forces amounts to some kind of work release program. (They've got a robot sidekick of their own, DERIC, voiced by MacLane himself, but he's quickly dropped from the narrative action, only reappearing during a post-credits scene.)  All in all, not the types that Buzz would necessarily choose to accept as his cadets, but he makes do under the circumstances, and the five characters get up to the expected hi-jinks in the second act, evading the Zurg bots, and the aggressive insect lifeforms endemic to the planet, all while seeking to blow up the Zurg mothership that powers the robots below.

Until they stop to eat sandwiches, at which point the movie suddenly gets baffling as hell all over again. Buzz is perturbed to discover that the sandwiches of the future are made in reverse order, with a single slice of bread in the middle and the filling now forming the two outer layers. (Why? Was there a bread shortage somewhere in the colony's timeline?). The results look spectacularly ugly, like someone removed the sandwich's internal organs and but them on the outside of its body. It is a ridiculously impractical way to eat a sarnie, and despite Mo's insistence that getting grease on your fingers is the main attraction (I'm sorry, what?), you can only imagine the level of mess you'd have to clean up when working with ingredients like hummus, mayonnaise or peanut butter, so I doubt this would catch on. My assumption, the first time I watched this film, was that the sandwich would form the basis of an analogy that would prove vital in the third act, about doing things in an unorthodox order, but that doesn't happen. Instead, Buzz's sandwich alienation gets to be its own bit of stand-alone weirdness. And here's the kicker - it isn't even played as one of those absurd things from the future that Buzz has to get used to (a la the similarly temporally misplaced Fry from Futurama). It's played with total melancholy, with Buzz finally conceding that the future sandwich tastes pretty good that way, before a bemused Izzy asks "Bread, meat, bread...how long did you do it that way?", and a mournful Buzz responds, "Forever", as if the script is somehow in full agreement that that is a miserable approach to sandwich consumption. I'm sure the intention was for there to be something a little deeper going on here than just sandwiches, but whatever it is, it doesn't make itself known.

Amid all this sandwich nonsense, you might be wondering when the big Z is finally going to show his face. Based on how his toy was characterised in Toy Story 2, he has the potential to be such a camp, hilarious and larger than life villain, and Lightyear could definitely use a shot of that in the arm...if they're seriously stopping the story to get doleful about sandwiches. Alas, when Buzz does finally come face to face with Zurg, it really does serve as the final nail in the coffin with regards to this being a functional precursor to the Buzz franchise as we've known it. The Toy Story films were vague on the specifics, but there was one significant nugget of Lightyear lore that was openly touted and fans had happily accepted as canon, which is that Zurg was Buzz's biological father. This was revealed in a comic interaction between the Zurg action figure and a second Buzz Lightyear figure in Toy Story 2, as a playful nod to Darth Vader's kinship with Luke Skywalker. I'm surprised that MacLane, being such an avid Star Wars fan, didn't retain it in his film. But no, that would have been too easy and straightforward a choice (a bit cliched, sure, but that was precisely the point), and judging by this film's track record, you surely must have anticipated they'd do something way more discombobulating. MacLane and co-writer Jason Headley do at least appear to have been conscious of this particular point when crafting the story (unlike the matter of the film supposedly hailing from the 1990s), finding a way to acknowledge it, if not actually adhere to it. "Dad?" Buzz asks, when Zurg removes his suit and is revealed to look a lot like himself, only older. "Guess again", says Zurg, as a much more beat-up version of Sox limps into view and to his side. Shocker - Zurg is really Buzz himself, from an alternate future timeline. Definitely not his father then. True, you could make the argument that it was toy Zurg, not the "real" Zurg, who claimed blood (plastic?) relations, and toy Zurg might not have known what he was talking about. But then Lightyear does very heavily imply, through all the deliberate parallels it draws, that toy Buzz came with an innate possession of the original's thought processes, speech patterns and tendencies, so I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for toy Zurg. His presumption that he was Buzz's father had to have come from somewhere, and that toy was fresh out of the box. How, according to this film's take, did future Buzz come to acquire the moniker Zurg? Apparently it all comes down to his robot underlings saying "Buzz" with an accent.

By now, it shouldn't surprise you that Zurg is neither a camp nor fun villain, and has instead been bitten by the same seriousness bug as everyone else. It's all a bit confusing, but Zurg is supposedly Buzz from his original timeline, in which Buzz evaded arrest by Cal by escaping centuries into the future and gained access to advanced technology. He eventually figured out how to travel backwards in time, and in doing so created some kind of timeline split with the Buzz we've been following. Zurg's goal is to go back far enough to prevent the Star Command vessel from ever landing on the planet, thus ensuring that the stranding will not happen and that everything in the aftermath will be undone. He has, however, exhausted his time travel fuel supply, and needs to obtain some from the current Buzz in order to complete his journey. This Zurg isn't in it for the evulz, he's just a sad, strange little man who's been warped by his obsession - the very lonely path that our own Buzz was destined to tread, had he not been convinced to pal up with Izzy and friends and learn about the value of social connection. Buzz's problem was that he was always too distant. He might have forged a close bond with Alisha, but he wouldn't allow himself to become a part of her new life on the colony. Even his relationship with Sox, while he obviously cared about him, was initially more functional than tender (he mistook the purring that came out of the cat for the sounds of malfunctioning when Izzy gave him an affectionate belly rub). Zurg-Buzz claims to be doing everything for the benefit of others, but lets his real motivation slip when he tells Buzz, "We're supposed to be space rangers. We're supposed to matter." What Zurg wants, even if he's not fully conscious of it, is the esteem of being the hero, and he doesn't see the irony of what he's turning into in that pursuit. Our Buzz demonstrates that he's grown in a way that Zurg-Buzz hasn't, when he contemplates that Alisha found happiness and a whole new purpose within the colony, and all that would be taken away from her if the vessel was prevented from landing. He points out that Izzy would not exist in the new timeline, but Zurg-Buzz never met Izzy, so the argument is lost on him.

This is Pixar in barefaced meaning of life mode, although the message itself is honestly nothing more radical than the kinds of morals the studio conveyed from the beginning. Was it not the implicit message of the very first Toy Story, when Woody assures Buzz that being a toy is a better deal than being a space ranger (an assertion that, with hindsight, comically undermines the value of spending time with Buzz the space ranger)? That a humble life filled with small but beautiful moments, even if they cannot last, is more fulfilling than one of fame and glory. Toy Story 2 had a variation on this same theme, when Woody rejected immortality as a museum artefact, deciding that he would sooner live life than watch it pass him by from the other side of a glass pane. Which is what Buzz was doing here, more-or-less, in that first act, when he was watching Alisha's life play out but not participating, to the point that he effectively squandered their friendship. I reject Reiss's assessment that Pixar started out as this fun studio who lost their way when they started implementing messages about what's really important in life, because it is the same damned thing they've been doing since 1995. But perhaps there is an argument to be made that the need to impress critics and adult audiences with its weighty theming has constrained Pixar, to the point where they couldn't make a picture that's first and foremost about the gleeful insanity, like The Bad Guys. In the case of Lightyear, that constraint was twofold. MacLane wanted to make a film that lived up to the Pixar model, and to sell it as a film that inspired Andy on a profound level, even though Andy was canonically six years old in 1995, and most of this would have gone over his head anyway. Wouldn't a child of his age have preferred something with more colour and kinetic energy? If ever there was a Pixar project that demanded to be light and tongue-in-cheek (with an obvious heart at the centre), this was it. There's a haunting parallel to be drawn between Lightyear itself and the corrupted Zurg-Buzz. It fervently believed that it needed to be grand and important, when it just needed to connect with people on a far simpler level.

The film gets to have its cake and eat it at the end, once Buzz defeats Zurg and returns to the liberated colony, where Cal forgives his past transgressions in light of his recent heroism, and agrees to hire Buzz as the leader of his new squad of space rangers. Buzz is given the opportunity to create a team from scratch with the colony's most elite soldiers, but chooses to retain his current team of Izzy (now astrophobia-free), Sox, Mo and Darby. Because being a space ranger is as brilliant as being a toy after all, so long as you're sharing the experience with people you love. The film concludes with Buzz blasting off with his crew toward their next adventure, and one final melancholic iteration of "To infinity and beyond!", even though this is the one place in which it would have been entirely appropriate for him to say it with the usual bombast. But stay tuned, because there are a couple of extra tidbits to come after the credits. First a comedic one in which we pick up where we left off with DERIC, who has sadly been forgotten by his friends. Then, at the very end (after Luxo Jr has made his appearance), a more dramatic stinger where Zurg, having been flung into the depths of space, is revealed to have survived, and is presumably set on menacing Buzz and co on another day.

With that, I've found a way in which Lightyear obviously recalls Lost in Space '98 (well, actually two - both films involve the protagonists interacting with alternate future versions of themselves in a way that feels a bit tepid as our third act conflict, especially when they had an entire universe filled with possibilities to play around with). They both end with hooks for sequels that were never realised. Both films had high hopes of being the next big thing, but underperformed at the box office and were stopped in their tracks, and now we'll never get to know what else they had planned (society's loss? Maybe?). I'm possibly being a tad presumptuous in concluding there'll be no Lightyear follow-up - as we know, the window for sequels with Pixar is a long one, and there's every chance that this could acquire a cult following down the line, a la Tron - but given its catastrophic failure to launch I doubt it will be a priority for Pixar any time soon. The 1990s had no shortage of these event picture blockbusters intended to kickstart franchises, that came with a blitz of marketing and merchandising, and then in a few short weeks had been all but memory-holed by the general public (Dick Tracy, The Shadow and that terrible American version of Godzilla, to name a few others), so it wouldn't be at all out of place in that regard.

Call me obstinate, but I will not accept Lightyear as the canon explanation for Buzz's origins in the Toy Story universe. The two worlds don't mesh, even in the context of one being a fictional franchise within the other. I've a sneaking suspicion that a toy Sox will show up somewhere in the upcoming Toy Story 5, which might make it harder to keep the two separate, but for now I still prefer my old assumption that Buzz came from a cartoon, be it Buzz Lightyear of Star Command or any other. I am, however, very glad that this film exists. I look on it as a failed experiment in the spin-off potential of the Toy Story franchise, with a handful of things that are legitimately good (the animation is beautiful and Sox is a charming enough character), and a lot that's endearingly ludicrous. I've got sympathy for MacLane, because I think he came to this from a position of love, but I also think he was seeing things in Buzz that weren't actually there. From there, almost every decision he made was either misconceived or incomprehensible, and the resulting picture is a glorious mess that's so wrong it's right. Lightyear is a head-spinning curio for the ages, one I will love and cherish every step of the way.

Andy thought it was the best movie ever. Allegedly. But what does a little kid who plays with cowboy dolls know about quality anyway?