Lightyear sees Pixar settling into a mediocrity that’s parsecs away from their heyday

Pixar’s latest big-screen offering sets out to tell the origin of Buzz Lightyear in a way that no movie prequel has ever really attempted before. There’s a metatextual leap that requires a brief primer before the film (unaccompanied by a short this time): “In 1995 Andy got a toy. That toy was from his favourite movie. This is that movie.”

Alerted by some strange sensor readings nearby, Buzz Lightyear diverts his colony ship to explore the world of T’Kani Prime. On discovering the planet is home to hostile insect life, Buzz leads a hasty retreat but due to his unwillingness to accept help, he crashes the ship on take-off, stranding the entire crew. One year later and the crew have built a colony and started a programme to refine the hyperspace fuel they need to fully repair the ship and resume their mission.

The movie-within-a-movie premise is straightforward enough yet something that the marketing for the film singularly failed to explain, no doubt leaving audiences confused as to how it connects to the beloved Pixar franchise it’s paradoxically both spun off from and, apparently, the wellspring of. And maybe that marketing obfuscation was a deliberate attempt to create some – ahem – buzz around a project which both in concept and execution feels like a TV spin-off unworthy of a theatrical release. Of course, much has been made about Pixar’s recent offerings suffering the supposed ignominy of debuting straight to Disney+ but LIGHTYEAR feels so generic and insubstantial that it does little to lift the general atmosphere of decline that’s plagued Pixar for the past few years and may have contributed to their Disneyplusification.

Of course, it looks good from an animation standpoint and you can’t deny that adequate Pixar is still superior to most mainstream animated offerings out there but there’s something about LIGHTYEAR that falls short of making that hyperspace leap to greatness that Pixar used to make look so effortless. Perhaps it’s the fact that this movie’s story was already covered, to a certain extent, by the 2000 straight-to-video cartoon BUZZ LIGHTYEAR OF STAR COMMAND: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS? Or maybe it’s the fact that although it has an admirable commitment to bringing the solid science of relativistic travel in to bolster the plot, that plot itself seems lifted almost wholesale from the 1998 LOST IN SPACE movie (borrowing liberally from the visuals of STARSHIP TROOPERS, STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME and even elements of TOP GUN: MAVERICK without the wit and guile that used to mark Pixar’s homages)? It might just be the fact that arrogant buffoon Buzz Lightyear – the author of the colony ship’s misfortunes – is consistently hailed as a hero who’ll ‘get there in the end’ while anybody and everybody else has to repeatedly prove themselves worthy in his eyes.

In the end, LIGHTYEAR is a perfectly serviceable but deeply generic animated space adventure, albeit one that’s surprising shallow and cliché for a Pixar movie. Perhaps, though, the biggest problem is that it presents itself as the movie that made Andy want to get a Buzz Lightyear toy. Having seen it myself, I have to call bullshit on that because there’s no way that Sox, Buzz’s robot cat, wouldn’t have become the breakout toy from this movie. No wonder there were rows and rows of unsold Buzz Lightyears in Al’s Toy Barn.