This is the real guy, so he is a bit more serious, and certainly more directly connected to the majesty of his legacy. This Buzz is not some vainglorious toy grimly realizing the horrifying limits of his reality. Lightyear is nearly the Pixar nadir that is Cars 2, just with a spiffier paint job.Ĭhris Evans, playing spaceman Buzz trying to right a wrong that has stranded his people on some desolate rock, never sells the joke of the character the way Tim Allen did for four films. That is a thin, or at least strained, premise for an expensive movie from a studio whose reputation for thoughtful, unique storytelling remains pretty sterling, if a bit tarnished. This is a movie that is-it’s been explained many times now-meant to be what Andy, the little boy from Toy Story who is now about 75 years old in that series’s timeline, watched and loved before he acquired his own Buzz Lightyear action figure, casting his toy ecosystem into chaos. The story, sadly, does not rise up to meet that work. What they’ve visually pulled off in Lightyear is stunning stuff.
In the rest of the film, we are simply watching beautiful computer rendering: a distant, ominous planet, the great and endless maw of stars that surrounds it.
Only the strange bulbousness of Pixar’s idea of the human head signifies that we are, in fact, looking at animation. A few moments in Lightyear, the new Pixar film in theaters now, look positively filmed.