movie review buzz lightyear

“Lightyear” is not the origin story of the Buzz Lightyear toy from Pixar’s “ Toy Story ” series. It’s the origin story of the reason the Buzz Lightyear toy wound up in Andy’s bedroom. You see, Andy’s Mom bought a Buzz Lightyear toy back in 1995 because he was the main character in Andy’s favorite film. “This is that film,” a title card tells us before plunging us into an animated space opera starring Chris Evans as Buzz. Along the way, we’ll meet the Evil Emperor Zurg and learn where all those catchphrases folks have been saying for the past 27 years originated.

I won’t fault suspicious viewers who think this sounds like a bunch of cash-grabbing malarkey, but I should point out that this retrofitting is not without Pixar precedent. If you recall, “ Toy Story 2 ” revealed that the Woody toy was originally a tie-in to a television show from the 1950s. Which begged the question as to why the Hell a millennial like Andy would want him. At least this time, the toy came from a contemporary reference for the kid. After seeing “Lightyear,” I was full of even more questions, such as, “Would Andy’s Mom have allowed a toy version of Buzz’s partner in her house?” And, “Come on, Andy! Why didn’t you ask your Mom for a toy version of Buzz’s cat?!”

More on the kitty cat later. “Lightyear” begins with a special mission for space rangers. Buzz is partnered with Alisha Hawthorne ( Uzo Aduba ), his best friend. They share in-jokes and memories of missions past. Hawthorne is a Black woman, something you don’t often see in space movies despite all that work they did for NASA in “ Hidden Figures .” She constantly mocks Buzz’s penchant for “monologuing,” that is, recording the Shatner-like captain’s log into that device on his arm. Before each adventure, the duo touch fingers and yell “To infinity and beyond!” which I assume would have been the tagline for this film when Andy saw it. By that rationale, the makers of “Lightyear” can sue the makers of “Toy Story” for stealing it.

But I digress. Buzz Lightyear, the movie character, has the same penchant for being stubborn and following his own path that his toy did. This gets him in a heap of trouble when he disregards the advice of both his team and his ship’s autopilot navigator I.V.A.N. ( Mary McDonald-Lewis ). The turnip-shaped ship he’s flying crashes, marooning everyone on a hostile planet filled with killer vines and bugs. Guilt-ridden, Buzz makes it his mission to discover an energy source that will help them achieve hyperspace and get off the planet.

Or something like that. The most important thing to know is that every failed attempt to reach his goal results in Buzz missing four years of life back home. Everyone gets older while he stays the same age. “Lightyear” represents much of this repeated passage of time in a montage scored by Michael Giacchino ; it’s reminiscent of the opening scene in “ Up .” Buzz’s unwillingness to accept failure keeps him from celebrating the marriage of Hawthorne and her girlfriend, the birth of their daughter, and far too many in-jokes and experiences for him to count. When he finally achieves hyperspace, it costs him 22 more years. By this time, Hawthorne has passed on, leaving him a recorded message that Aduba delivers with such bittersweet beauty that there were audible sniffles at my screening. You’ll hear them at yours, too.

Hawthorne’s message is delivered to Buzz by her daughter, Izzy ( Keke Palmer ). She’s inhabiting the latest iteration of their home planet, one that’s full of hostile robots who are under the control of the suspicious “Zurg” space ship. Buzz sees a new shot at getting everyone off the planet. Unfortunately, he’s on the outs with Commander Burnside (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) the military man who used to run things, and must retrieve the turnip ship without any skilled help. Izzy offers to assist and volunteers her team of amateurs, ex-con/bomb expert Darby Steel ( Dale Soules ) and Mo Morrison ( Taika Waititi ). Their space ranger abilities are best described by Whitlock’s profane catchphrase on “The Wire.” Morrison is so bad, and causes so much trouble, that he manages to make the pig-headed Buzz look reasonable.

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. They fill “Lightyear” with details that are sure to inspire arguments on Twitter from the “Toy Story” faithful. The film’s visuals gleefully rob from other movies. I saw “ Return of the Jedi ,” “ Avatar ,” “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ” and even “ The Last Starfighter ” amongst the inspirations. I.V.A.N. looks like something Nintendo would have created. Each character fits neatly into the familiar roles the genre specifies: Flawed heroes seeking redemption, rookies hoping to prove themselves, villains with secrets, and so on. The score by Michael Giacchino is one of his best, a delectable spoof of bombastic space movie music that elevates every scene it plays under.

Of course, every great hero needs a great sidekick. “Lightyear” gives us Sox ( Peter Sohn ), an adorable cat whose job is to offer emotional support to Buzz. Sox speaks in soothing tones, sort of a cross between “ Big Hero 6 ”’s Baymax and HAL, and will purr if you scratch his stomach. He is exceptionally good at calculations and occasionally makes a noise that sounds like “Be-boop, be-boop, be-boop!” Like any cat, Sox is full of surprises both hilarious and ominous. If Pixar’s plan was to create a character whose toy would fly off the shelves, they were successful. He has one scene in the movie—you’ll know it when you see it—that elicited audible gasps of panic in the theater. I’m not a cat person, but I was stanning so hard for Sox that I wanted to—you’re mocking me, aren’t you?

No matter. As far as spin-offs go, “Lightyear” is a lot of fun. The voice talent is topnotch, especially Palmer and Evans. They have big shoes to fill; Palmer has to build on the emotional bond Aduba created, and Evans has to give us a Buzz Lightyear that’s close enough to Tim Allen ’s characterization to make us believe the film’s toy tie-in. Sohn is perfectly feline and Bill Hader has a good time with his small role as a rookie with a difficult to pronounce last name. When Zurg finally appears, he’s voiced with a deranged glee by Mr. Barbara Streisand himself, James Brolin . Hell, if his kid can play Thanos, I guess he can play Zurg.

After the lackluster “ Toy Story 4 ,” I’d had enough of this series, so much so that I expected to file a negative review. In the immortal words of Buzz Lightyear, “Not today!”

“Lightyear” will be available only in theaters on June 17.

Odie Henderson

Odie “Odienator” Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

• Chris Evans as Buzz Lightyear (voice)
• Keke Palmer as Izzy Hawthorne (voice)
• Dale Soules as Darby Steel (voice)
• Taika Waititi as Mo Morrison (voice)
• Peter Sohn as Sox (voice)
• Uzo Aduba as Alisha Hawthorne (voice)
• James Brolin as Emperor Zurg (voice)
• Mary McDonald-Lewis as I.V.A.N. (voice)
• Efren Ramirez as Airman Diaz (voice)
• Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Commander Burnside (voice)
• Keira Hairston as Young Izzy (voice)

Writer (based on characters created by)

• Andrew Stanton
• John Lasseter
• Pete Docter
• Angus MacLane
• Jason Headley
• Anthony Greenberg

Cinematographer

• Ian Megibben
• Jeremy Lasky
• Michael Giacchino

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‘Lightyear’ Review: Infinite Buzz

The new Pixar movie recounts the adventures of Star Command’s most famous Space Ranger before he was a toy.

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By A.O. Scott

The simple, charming premise of “Lightyear” is explained in an onscreen text. “In 1995, a boy named Andy got a toy from his favorite movie. This is that movie.” In other words, it’s the origin story not of a hero but of a piece of merchandise, one that started out fictional but long ago crossed the boundary into real life. More than one hard plastic Buzz Lightyear lived in my house for a long time, just like in Andy’s. To be part of the “Toy Story” universe is to be intimately acquainted with the metaphysics of the commodity form.

This Buzz is a little different, though. He isn’t a toy, and he doesn’t sound like Tim Allen, who did the voice work in the four chapters of Pixar’s “Toy Story” cycle. He’s a real live animated make-believe Space Ranger, and he speaks in the manly baritone of Chris Evans, who played Captain America over in the Marvel Universe zone of the Disney empire.

Like Cap, Buzz is square-jawed, stoic and shadowed by a hint of melancholy — a soulful soldier in an endless corporate campaign. If “Lightyear” lacks both the sublimity and the giddy inventiveness of the best “Toy Story” movies, that may be by design. This isn’t supposed to be a 21st-century masterpiece, but a kid-friendly, merch-spawning movie from 1995. (That was a pretty good year for commercial cinema , by the way.) The Buzz Lightyear toy was meant to stick around after the movie had been forgotten, and to populate a richer, more varied imaginative landscape.

“Lightyear,” directed by Angus MacLane from a script by Jason Headley, aims to please by pandering, to be good-enough entertainment. As such, it succeeds in a manner more in line with second-tier Disney animation than with top-shelf Pixar. The hero, fighting off an invasion force of alien robots, falls in with a motley group of misfits, in whom he must instill the competence and confidence necessary for the task. The action is wrapped in lessons, delivered in a manner that isn’t too preachy, about how it’s OK to make mistakes as long as you learn from them. And there is a scene-stealing animal sidekick, in this case a robot cat named SOX, voiced in perfect feline-A.I. deadpan by Peter Sohn.

A few soft-boiled Easter eggs pop up to connect “Lightyear” with various “Toy Story” episodes. Remember Zurg? He’s back, with James Brolin’s growl and a secret I won’t spoil. An early section — a kind of extended prologue to the main action — recalls the celebrated montage in “Up” that compresses a long marriage into a few short minutes. This time, the focus is on the friendship between Buzz and his closest colleague, Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), who crash-land a crowded space vessel on a distant planet.

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Lightyear First Reviews: An Exhilarating, Visually Spectacular Sci-Fi Adventure for Fans who Grew Up with Toy Story

Critics say pixar's toy story -adjacent space romp is gorgeous and fun, even if it doesn't reach the studio's greatest heights, and a scene-stealing sox the cat will be everyone's new favorite sidekick..

TAGGED AS: animated , Animation , Film , films , movie , movies , Pixar , toy story

Pixar returns to theaters with Lightyear , a sort of spin-off of their Toy Story franchise featuring the in-universe inspiration for the Buzz Lightyear toy (voiced here by Chris Evans ). The first reviews of the movie celebrate its animated sci-fi action and adventure story and visuals, as well as its scene-stealing robot cat for comic relief, but it’s not necessarily the studio’s greatest release.

Here’s what critics are saying about Lightyear :

Does it live up to peak Pixar?

Lightyear is the best movie of the year so far, and the best Pixar movie in quite some time. – Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky

Lightyear emerges as a disappointing runner-up, capturing but a fraction of the comedy, thrills, and poignancy of its predecessors. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Sadly it never reaches the emotional highs that Pixar was known for. – John Nguyen, Nerd Reactor

It lacks the emotional weight and meaning Pixar moviegoers expect. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Not every Pixar production needs to be a new modern classic, but… Lightyear is not exactly going to occupy too much space in my mind in the weeks to come. – Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment

(Photo by ©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

Will Toy Story fans love it?

The film captures the magic of what made the Toy Story franchise while confidently opening the door for new fans to the franchise. – David Gonzalez, Reel Talk Inc.

For old and new Toy Story and family adventure fans alike, this is worthwhile dream fulfillment and highly exciting entertainment. – Don Shanahan, Every Movie Has a Lesson

Angus MacLane’s animated space adventure is an absolute winner with thematic and emotional resonance, just like the Toy Story films before it. – Ryan McQuade, Awards Watch

This is a movie for Toy Story adults — the people who grew up on the movies and now hold jobs and mortgages — not Toy Story children. – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

It won’t engage the heart or the head in the way that Toy Story films have led viewers to expect over the last quarter-century-plus. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

What ultimately waters down Lightyear … is an absence of the excitement and disciplined storytelling spirit that made Toy Story such a pioneering hit. – Tomris Laffly, AV Club

How is the writing?

Angus MacLane and his co-writer Jason Headley craft a transportive and imaginative screenplay… The most impressive thing about the duo’s screenplay is added layers of freshness to an already beloved character. – David Gonzalez, Reel Talk Inc.

The script… tosses off a few gently mind-bending twists, but otherwise rests comfortably within an accessible, highly allusive branch of family-friendly science fiction. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

The movie feels a little episodic… like a kid recapping the plot of a movie, saying, “This happened and then this happened and then this happened.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

This feels like a story designed off a checklist rather than one told from the heart because it needs to be told. – Rob Hunter, Film School Rejects

What about a strong message for the kids?

Lightyear will show you why Andy was enamored with his movie of choice and make you remember which one did that to you too back when you were a kid. – Don Shanahan, Every Movie Has a Lesson

Lightyear is a moving movie to see in our modern, cynical times when we can see people grow beyond what they are into the people we need them to be. – Ryan McQuade, Awards Watch

There is a lesbian kiss in Lightyear … This is a great way to have LGBTQ+ representation and inclusion on the screen, and should be applauded. – Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky

A tired message better taught in Monsters University : never underestimate the hard work, determination, and loyalty of your allies. – Tomris Laffly, AV Club

Does it play well as a sci-fi action movie?

Lightyear is still an extremely fun action sci-fi film that is better than most animated films released in a given year. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

The space action is genuinely thrilling with stakes as high as Gravity . – Fred Topel, United Press International

Pixar has dabbled in the action genre with The Incredibles and doubles down here with visually impressive, grin-inducing shootouts and fights. – Jonathan Sim, ComingSoon.net

It works out well enough to be entertaining overall for people who enjoy animated films that take place in outer space. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Offers exhilarating action sequences, involving racing rockets, robot armies, and a truly breathtaking space walk. – Kristy Puchko, Mashable

The outer-space visuals and action-packed fight sequences are undoubtedly riveting. – Mike Massie, Gone With the Twins

How are the visuals?

If it needs to be said, the film is a visual triumph, with stunningly photo-real images and richly detailed deep-space locations. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

Lightyear is easily Pixar’s best-looking movie yet. It isn’t even a question. – Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky

One of the most aesthetically appealing features Pixar has done. The environments’ scale and scope are dazzling. Many gorgeous frames are pure art. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

With stunning space sequences, Lightyear adds to a genre rich in space beauty with one of the best-looking films of the year. – David Gonzalez, Reel Talk Inc.

Lightyear has visual pizzazz, from the hyperspace sequences to the heretofore hidden surprises that emerge from those colorful buttons and dials on the Space Ranger uniforms. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

The visuals are definitely up to Pixar standards, but the visual effects in Lightyear  are not really game-changing or extraordinary. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

How is Chris Evans as the new voice of Buzz?

While Evans’s version of Buzz is akin to Tim Allen’s interpretation, this version is given the space to mold something fresh. – Ryan McQuade, Awards Watch

Evans puts his stamp on the character and makes it relatively easy to forget about the re-voice casting and fall back into the world of Buzz. – David Gonzalez, Reel Talk Inc.

Evans also does a commendable job of taking on the iconic role of Buzz Lightyear, giving the character just the right amount of gravitas and heroism that he needs, but mixed with just a dash of ignorance and naivety. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

He’s intentionally impersonating George Clooney for the entire movie; that’s how it sounds, anyway. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

[He] does a creditable job… though a bit of that Allen snap gets lost. The character seems less funny, a notch more ordinary. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Will fans love the new characters too?

One of the movie’s greatest strengths is that it introduces characters with memorable personalities and quirks, with Sox being the one that viewers might be talking about the most. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Sox immediately belongs in the pantheon of great Pixar secondary characters, alongside Edna Mode, Dug, and Bing Bong. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

One of the best character debuts in any Pixar film. – David Gonzalez, Reel Talk Inc.

[Sox the cat is] one of the best new characters in recent Pixar memory. – Ryan McQuade, Awards Watch

Despite feeling a bit derivative of Baymax in Big Hero 6 , [Sox] the cat brings much-needed charm, heart and smile with his cute behavior, funny situations, and loyalty as a companion. – John Nguyen, Nerd Reactor

Izzy is an instant fan fav. She has the charm, the comedy, determination, overall countenance, natural hair, and all, of a character people can relate to. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

This [movie] is packed to the gills with vibrant characters and creepy villains, most of which are sadly more interesting than Buzz himself. – Tomris Laffly, AV Club

Should they have just titled the movie “ Sox the Cat “?

His presence alone makes this movie worth the price of admission. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Suffice it to say, Sox would be the toy every kid would have wanted after this film, not a Buzz Lightyear. – Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment

Hey, if Disney wants to make a Sox streaming show or spin-off movie, I’ll happily watch that. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

Is it a good sign for the future of Pixar?

If Luca , Turning Red , and Lightyear is the vision of Pixar going forward… then we are looking at a whole new renaissance by this prestigious animated institution. – Ryan McQuade, Awards Watch

If this is what Pixar can accomplish without really stretching its creative or emotional talents, just imagine what they could do if they gave it their all. – Rob Hunter, Film School Rejects

Lightyear opens in theaters on June 17, 2022.

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While spending years attempting to return home, marooned Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear encounters an army of ruthless robots commanded by Zurg who are attempting to steal his fuel source. While spending years attempting to return home, marooned Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear encounters an army of ruthless robots commanded by Zurg who are attempting to steal his fuel source. While spending years attempting to return home, marooned Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear encounters an army of ruthless robots commanded by Zurg who are attempting to steal his fuel source.

• Angus MacLane
• Matthew Aldrich
• Jason Headley
• Chris Evans
• Keke Palmer
• 1.1K User reviews
• 259 Critic reviews
• 60 Metascore
• 2 wins & 23 nominations

Top cast 13

• Buzz Lightyear

• Izzy Hawthorne

• Mo Morrison

• Darby Steel

• Alisha Hawthorne

• Commander Burnside

• Featheringhamstan

• Airman Díaz
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia The oxygen tanks in the movie are actually the scream canisters used in Monsters, Inc.
• Goofs The hyper speed shown in the movie is extremely slow considering the distances involved. When Buzz is doing the fuel tests his speed is measured in c, with 1c being 100% hyper speed. In physics 1c is the speed of light. The text at the start of the movie states T'Kani Prime is 4.2 million light years from Earth, which means it would take 4.2 million years to travel that distance at the speed of light. Given the Turnip is supposed to be an exploration ship, an 8 million year round trip does not seem practical.

Buzz Lightyear : To infinity...

[point his finger to her]

Izzy : [looks stunned] Are you trying to get me to pull your finger?

Mo Morrison : Don't fall for it.

Buzz Lightyear : No, not like that! It's just... Ugh. Sorry, it's a thing your grandma and I used to do.

Darby Steel : Ew.

• Crazy credits [SPOILER] There are 3 scenes during the end credits: a mid-credits scene about two minutes into the credits that shows a bug being blasted by the laser shield, a post-credits scene immediately before the studio logos where DERIC finishes giving directions to the storehouse and realizes everyone has already left, and a final scene after the studio logos revealing that Zurg survived the explosion.
• Connections Featured in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: The Rat of All My Dreams (2020)

User reviews 1.1K

• larshoeijmans
• Jun 15, 2022
• How long is Lightyear? Powered by Alexa
• Will Zurg ever get a spin off?
• August 3, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Site
• Lightyear - Cảnh Sát Vũ Trụ
• Pixar Animation Studios - 1200 Park Avenue, Emeryville, California, USA (Studio)
• Pixar Animation Studios
• The Walt Disney Company
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $200,000,000 (estimated)
• $118,307,188
• $50,577,961
• Jun 19, 2022
• $226,425,420

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 45 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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Lightyear follows a familiar Pixar theme — and that’s its biggest problem

By echoing so many past Pixar messages, the Toy Story tie-in opens itself up to comparisons and comes out behind

by Tasha Robinson

For the last seven years, one of the most popular critical analyses of Pixar Animation Studios movies has come from a Tumblr meme. Granted, it’s an insightful meme. The idea that Pixar movies all boil down to “ What if [random object] had feelings? ” does hold water, and given how much the studio built its name on the idea of evoking profound, powerful adult emotions in animated movies, it’s an understandable lens for viewing Pixar work.

But the studio’s new science fiction movie Lightyear suggests another way of looking at Pixar that’s a little less simple, but just as relevant. Arguably, Pixar’s strongest movies are about people (or toys, rats, robots, anthropomorphized emotions, etc.) figuring out how to accept who they are and how to live with each other. Lightyear forges new ground for Pixar with an ambitious story built around a new alien world and a new human society, focusing on how one man deals with his own shortcomings and losses over the course of more than half a century of lost time. But at heart, it links back to that core Pixar concept about opening up to other people as a first step toward finding a comfortable place in the world. That should be a resonant theme — certainly past Pixar movies, from Inside Out to Up to Coco to the original Toy Story , have drawn powerful narratives from the same message. But Lightyear takes such a disjointed, surface-level approach to the idea that it doesn’t land as powerfully as it should.

Lightyear has a slightly complicated place in Pixar’s franchise thinking. It’s meant to be a fictional artifact from the Toy Story world: the favorite sci-fi movie of Toy Story ’s central human character, Andy. Toy Story ’s toy version of Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen) is a piece of merch from the Lightyear movie, where Buzz is a human astronaut (voiced by the MCU’s Captain America, Chris Evans), part of an elite team of Space Rangers. The bits and pieces of Lightyear ’s arc implied throughout the Toy Story movies — like Buzz’s various pull-string catchphrases and the existence of his big purple robot enemy Zurg — were all elements Finding Dory co-director Angus MacLane and his co-writer Jason Headley ( Onward ) had to deal with in plotting Lightyear . (MacLane told Polygon in an interview that they ignored the previous Toy Story animated spinoff, 2000’s film and TV series Buzz Lightyear of Star Command .)

But those connections aside, Lightyear is meant to stand entirely on its own as an adult science fiction story rather than a movie primarily aimed at 6-year-olds like Andy. Which certainly explains some of its bigger ideas. As the film opens, Buzz is part of a human mission into deep space, aboard a bulbous, turnip-shaped ship full of cryogenically frozen explorers. When the ship is diverted to explore life signs on a planet en route to their final destination, Buzz and his commanding officer Alisha (Uzo Aduba) are thawed out to investigate. The planet proves dangerous, and Buzz tries to pilot the ship to safety, but he miscalculates, damaging the fuel crystal that lets the ship enter hyperspace and leaving it stranded in hostile territory.

Obsessed with fixing his error, Buzz takes on a series of experimental missions to space to test new fuel crystals. But because he approaches the speed of light in those missions, time passes more slowly for him than for the colonists he left behind. After every mission, most of which blur by in a quick montage, he returns to find Alisha older — first married to a woman she met while he was gone, then with young children, then adult children, and so forth. The colonists move on as well, settling in on their new planet and adapting to it, until they finally decide there’s no point in devoting resources to Buzz’s ongoing mission.

That’s a lot to take in as just the scene-setting for the actual action of the film. Too much of it whips by as if there are no questions to be asked and nothing worth mentioning about the ship’s original mission or the society it came from, the time that passes between Buzz’s missions, or whether anyone starts questioning their worth before the hammer finally drops on them. There’s nothing in that setup about how Buzz lives from one day to the next when he’s on the planet, or whether Alisha ever tries to talk him out of his obsessive space jaunts. It’s all presented as the basic buy-in for the rest of the movie, which deals with Buzz’s refusal to accept the future he’s suddenly found himself in, and his struggle to let go of the past.

As a Flash Gordon-style space adventure packed with fast-moving alien creepy-crawlies, snappy banter, and big explosive action, Lightyear is perfectly enjoyable. There’s a lot of funny business about Buzz narrating his actions as if he’s the hero in a space serial, and a strange, silly scene about the sandwiches of the future. It’s no wonder all this would appeal to Andy and his generation, who likely see it much like 6-year-olds in our world might: as an exciting rush through a world packed with killer robots, icky monster-bugs, and cool laser swords.

But Lightyear is so clearly calibrated to be something more: a thoughtful meditation on the passage of time. Its biggest ideas all point to the need to connect with people and live in the present rather than the past. It’s a warning about all the things we might miss if we fixate on past mistakes instead of letting them go. And on that level, the film never hits as hard as it’s meant to.

In part, that’s because the script spends too much time explaining those themes. In part, it’s because there’s so much other business getting in the way. A robot cat named Sox, given to Buzz as a therapeutic tool to help him adapt to his time skips (and voiced by The Good Dinosaur director Peter Sohn), serves up plenty of gleeful visual and verbal jokes, but never serves his primary purpose. Buzz’s new allies Izzy (Keke Palmer), Mo (Taika Waititi), and Darby (Dale Soules) each get micro-arcs of their own, but they’re largely underdeveloped characters who mostly exist to remind Buzz that he needs to learn the value of teamwork — a moral lesson that crops up so often in kids’ movies that it’s hard to see it as an adult value here.

The way that arc plays out is particularly familiar. In the setup sequence, Buzz repeatedly refuses to accept a rookie on his mission with Alisha. He insists that he works alone and doesn’t need help or input from others. He’s echoing another big-chinned hero who has to learn the value of teamwork: Mr. Incredible, whose similar rejection of a rookie sidekick in the opening sequence of Pixar’s The Incredibles drives the entire plot of that movie.

But Lightyear doesn’t have the same narrative neatness or force. Buzz continues to echo his “I’ve got this, I don’t need help” line as he’s making his big mistake, but there’s no real evidence that teamwork could have solved the problem, or that the rookie he’s shoving aside had anything to offer. His error stems more from overconfidence in his own abilities, and not listening to the ship’s computerized autopilot. There’s only a slight disjunction between “accept other people’s help” and “listen to a robot’s calculations,” but it’s still a fairly serious one that highlights the little ways Lightyear doesn’t entirely connect its emotional dots. When Zurg finally emerges — and unlike so many recent Pixar movies, Lightyear is absolutely a story with an actual old-school villain — there’s a thematic connection to the film’s morals there as well, but one that doesn’t fully make sense within the world MacLane and Headley have laid out.

None of this keeps Lightyear from being a satisfying experience in any given scene, as Buzz and his various teammates outfight aliens and out-think robots, all on the road to the inevitable moment where Buzz finds a way to accept his life and what he’s made of it. The problem is in the ways the pieces all add up into something that never digs as deeply into these characters as it needs to. The Pixar craft is on full display, as MacLane and his team fill the screen with a polished, immersive world full of emotive, likable characters. (Notably, many of them are people of color in roles that don’t revolve around their racial heritage — a welcome reflection of Pixar’s ongoing steps forward in on-screen representation.)

But they’re up against so many past Pixar successes that mine similar emotions and ideas. They all have different constructions, but most of them have more power, in part because they bring more passion to bear. So many of the best Pixar movies are about characters struggling to fulfill one dream or another, but Lightyear makes it clear early on that its hero’s dream is unworthy and misguided, making it harder for viewers to fully engage with his battle to make it happen. (Headley’s Onward takes a similar tack in its climax, but at least lets the audience root for the heroes throughout the rest of the story.)

And that dream might have stronger roots if Lightyear spent a little more time on establishing about who Buzz was in the world he wants to get back to. It’s clear what he’s lost, but not what he values: It’s clear who he is, but not who he wants to be. Certainly viewers will fill in those blanks themselves based on what they value, but that rush to put all the narrative pieces in place leaves too many of the details in viewers’ hands. Seen through that enduring Tumblr lens, Lightyear could be summed up as: “What if people wracked with guilt and regret had feelings?” But seen as another Pixar film about acceptance and connection, it feels like a less heartfelt, more calculated echo of some of the studio’s more personal projects. It’s a familiar message, in a pleasantly shiny but visibly flawed new shell.

Lightyear debuts in theaters on June 17.

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Pixar’s ‘lightyear’: film review.

Chris Evans voices the big-screen Space Ranger who became a 'Toy Story' action figure in the sci-fi adventure spinoff, also featuring Uzo Aduba, Keke Palmer and Taika Waititi.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The conflict in Pixar ’s ageless 1995 breakthrough feature, Toy Story , hinged on the displacement anxiety of old-fashioned pull-string cowboy doll Woody when his young owner Andy acquired a popular new action figure called Buzz Lightyear . The movie named for that Space Ranger, Lightyear , extends the Toy Story franchise by showing us the sci-fi adventure that hooked Andy on the character and inspired the merch. This is a funny spinoff with suspense and heart, a captivatingly spirited toon take on splashy live-action retro popcorn entertainment. The title character is given splendid voice by Chris Evans , balancing heroism and human fallibility with infectious warmth.

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My one major gripe is that this movie has left me low-key obsessed with wanting an emotional support cat robot like Sox, the feline automaton companion assigned to Buzz by Star Command to ease his troubled mind after a series of setbacks. I’ve thought of little else since seeing Lightyear , so I hope you’re happy, Pixar.

Release date : Friday, June 17 Cast : Chris Evans, Uzo Aduba, Peter Sohn, Keke Palmer, Taika Waititi, Dale Soules, James Brolin, Mary McDonald-Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Efren Ramirez, Keira Hairston Director : Angus MacLane Screenwriters : Jason Headley, Angus MacLane

In the studio’s tradition of enlisting members of its creative team to do voice work, Sox is voiced by animator Peter Sohn. The cat is a digital assistant and a sympathetic listener, but he’s also a playful kitty prone to chasing lasers. And in place of fur balls, he can cough up a blowtorch or a tranquilizer dart to immobilize an adversary when necessary. Sox is a cute take on the classic Disney animal sidekick, and is typical of the endearing sense of humor at work in the screenplay co-written by director Angus MacLane and Jason Headley.

Since ranking now seems obligatory, this is solid mid-tier Pixar with plenty of kid appeal and a significant nostalgia factor for fans of ‘80s and ‘90s sci-fi. It can’t touch the studio’s space-age masterpiece, Wall-E, or Brad Bird’s ineffably moving The Iron Giant , from Warner Bros. But the beauty of the outer-space environments and the expressive charm of the characters should make this play well as the first Pixar release to hit theaters since the pandemic began. That includes IMAX screens, with parts of the film specifically shot in the larger format.

The title character of course is embedded in the imaginations of generations as an action figure — voiced by Tim Allen over four features — who came out of the box convinced he was a real Space Ranger in Toy Story . The shattering of that illusion and the rewards of becoming part of a tight-knit community gradually taught Buzz humility, reshaping him from an over-confident he-man to a lovable, occasionally clueless goofball; from a solo star to a team player.

In reimagining the live-action screen hero (albeit in a CG rendering) on whom the toy was based, the filmmakers’ first smart decision was casting Evans, whose overlapping Captain America experience enhances his authority in the role. This version shares the physical characteristics of the toy — the puffed-up barrel chest, the massive astronaut’s jawline and dimpled chin — but is more flexible both in his facial features and movements, as befits a theoretically flesh-and-blood character over a plastic one.

But the new Buzz’s emotional arc is not altogether unlike that of his toy-store counterpart. At the start of the adventure, he respects his friend and mentor Commander Alisha Hawthorne ( Uzo Aduba ), but he’s also an elitist who likes to be in control. His hero complex is such that he even narrates his own story, passing it off as a mission log. He’s as dismissive of rookie recruits as he is of his spaceship’s autopilot function, I.V.A.N., or Internal Voice-Activated Navigator, voiced by Mary McDonald-Lewis.

Lightyear is about how this gung-ho Space Ranger learns to acknowledge his human limitations and accept help. It’s also about the passage of time, and whether we fixate on regrets or move forward with whatever circumstances life presents.

That’s Buzz’s dilemma when he and his commander and their 1,000-member science and tech crew, while heading home to Earth, stop to investigate an uncharted planet, T’Kani Prime. Hostile life forms — aggressive monster vines and giant flying bugs — prompt a hasty exit, in which Buzz attempts the same steep cliff-climb flight maneuver recently seen in Top Gun: Maverick . Only he’s not so lucky. Damage to the fuel cell leaves them stranded on T’Kani Prime, with no way home until they can fix the hyper-speed drive.

Crushed by his rare taste of failure, Buzz vows to complete the mission and return everyone to Earth. But one year later, his first hyper-speed test flight using crystal fuel made from the planet’s natural resources is a bust. And the time dilation of his 4-minute flight means that everyone back on T’Kani Prime has aged more than 4 years when he returns.

With each successive test flight, that process intensifies, so while Buzz remains the same age, relentlessly pursuing a solution, everyone he knows accepts their situation and gets on with life within the new colony’s protected perimeters. This applies especially to Commander Hawthorne, an openly queer character who marries her girlfriend, becomes a mother and an eventual grandmother while Buzz continues plugging away at the perfect crystal fuel formula, aided by Sox.

Pixar and Disney films both have shown faith over the decades in children’s ability to understand death, and Lightyear is no exception, providing poignant moments of loss that cut deeper with Buzz since his life has essentially remained frozen in time.

But when a new threat emerges in the form of an alien spaceship captained by mega-robot Zurg ( James Brolin ) and his army of Zyclops automatons, Buzz is forced to go rogue. His only backup comes from the Junior Zap Patrol, a ragtag trio of volunteer cadet trainees that includes Alisha’s granddaughter Izzy ( Keke Palmer ), who dreams of becoming a Space Ranger if she can overcome her fears; clumsy beanpole Mo ( Taika Waititi ), who admits he was an academic underachiever; and jaded Darby (Dale Soules), a tough as nails old broad who’s more than happy to overlook the veto on weapons handling that is one of her parole conditions.

How that band of outsiders find mutual trust and strength in their collaborative know-how while also discovering their individual skills is a story very much out of the Pixar playbook — albeit with some time-bending twists as they travel into the future.

MacLane, who co-directed Finding Dory as well as a couple of Toy Story shorts, and Headley, who co-wrote Onward , are clearly genre fanboys high on the boundless capacity of sci-fi to create distant worlds; they toss in nods to everything from Starship Troopers to Alien to Gravity . The material is bouncy and light-hearted, even as danger mounts — there are loads of amusing throwaway jokes that humanize technology, like I.V.A.N. releasing a cockpit confetti bomb when the hyper-speed works, or two Zyclops exchanging nervous side-eye glances when Zurg stomps out in a rage.

But the filmmakers also inject plenty of tenderness, especially in the way Buzz comes to care for and rely on the crew that initially seemed such a liability. Having been too busy with his mission to focus on any personal life of his own, he finds unexpected closeness with his surprisingly resourceful cadets, particularly Palmer’s spunky Izzy, who represents a continuous line from his friendship with her grandmother. The comforts of fellowship also tidily echo the bonds that action-figure Buzz found with Andy’s other toys.

The textured visuals are often breathtaking, pulsing with luminous color, and the detailed character work is delightful, matched by strong contributions from the voice actors. Involvement in the story is enriched at every turn by Michael Giacchino ’s robust orchestral score, which ranges from quiet, intimate moments through hard-charging suspense to triumphal jubilation. The film gets in on the MCU act with a jokey mid-credits sequence and then a more dramatic one at the very end, opening the door to a sequel.

Perhaps the sweetest adjustment here to the familiar Toy Story Buzz is that his cornball heroic catchphrase, “To infinity and beyond,” is as much a reinforcement of human connection as a rallying cry for space adventure.

Full credits

Production company: Pixar Animation Studios Distribution: Disney Cast: Chris Evans, Uzo Aduba, Peter Sohn, Keke Palmer, Taika Waititi, Dale Soules, James Brolin, Mary McDonald-Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Efren Ramirez, Keira Hairston, Bill Hader Director: Angus MacLane Screenwriters: Jason Headley, Angus MacLane Story: Angus MacLane, Matthew Aldrich, Jason Headley Producer: Galyn Susman Executive producers: Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter Directors of photography: Jeremy Lasky, Ian Megibben Production designer: Tim Evatt Music: Michael Giacchino Editor: Anthony J. Greenberg Sound designer: Ren Klyce Animation supervisor: David DeVan Character supervisor: Mark Piretti Effects supervisor: Bill Watral Visual effects supervisor: Jane Yen Casting: Kevin Reher, Natalie Lyon

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Lightyear is a good movie — and an even better IP grab

Lightyear will makes lots of money, and sell even more toys.

by Alex Abad-Santos

The running joke about Disney-Pixar movies is how well they imbue feelings into objects and lifeforms that don’t often clearly display them. Finding Nemo is about how fish have feelings. Ratatouille is about how rats have feelings. Cars is about how automobiles have feelings. Even Pixar’s logo, a little anthropomorphized lamp, seems to have feelings.

Similarly then, Lightyear is about how white men have feelings.

Lightyear centers on Buzz Lightyear. You likely know Buzz as a starring character in the vaunted, 27-year-old Toy Story franchise about a boy named Andy and his secretly sentient batch of action figures, dolls, and playthings. However, Lightyear is not a continuing solo adventure of that tiny plastic hero (who was voiced by Tim Allen). According to Disney and Pixar lore, Lightyear (2022) is the actual 1995 sci-fi flick that inspired the Buzz Lightyear toys in Andy’s universe. Andy saw Lightyear and wanted the action figure, which his mother purchased for him in the original Toy Story.

Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies is simply a toy representation of this original, fictional Buzz Lightyear (who is voiced by Chris Evans). Despite their differences, a shared idea of both Buzzes Lightyear — daring, stubborn, strong — is understood by Andy and by us. It’s a pretty high concept for a children’s movie.

Lightyear itself is a sweet musing on the value of friendship, an origin story that gives the titular character a sense of purpose, and a zippy ride through an often-gorgeous cosmic world. There’s also a hilarious robot cat named Sox; I am frightened by my own affection toward Sox. All in all, Lightyear is easily in the top half of Disney and Pixar’s filmography. It’s a charming and, at times, acutely funny space adventure.

Yet, there’s something beneath the surface that compromises Disney and Pixar’s proficient storytelling. It’s the idea that Lightyear exists not to just give us a free-standing movie about this space ranger’s feelings, but rather to take advantage of Disney’s very lucrative intellectual property. For a character whose famous words are “to infinity and beyond,” Lightyear feels predictable, content to play within Disney’s plum boundaries rather than push Disney and Pixar into a thrilling future.

If you think about Lightyear ’s existence too much, your brain may start to itch with questions.

Lightyear is animated the way Andy from Toy Story is animated, so does Andy perceive Lightyear as an animated movie, or is it live-action? Can Andy, who is 6 years old at the start of the first Toy Story , even understand what the movie is about? And how does Lightyear even exist in our own universe, 27 years after its debut? How did it get here? And why is it here?

Like a faceless god, the movie does not give any concrete answers to those queries. Instead, it gives us a story about failure (kind of) and friendship.

This Buzz Lightyear, along with his bestie, space ranger Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), is part of a crew responsible for exploring an unexplored planet. They quickly discover this uncharted world is a hostile one, full of giant bugs and strangling vines, which is made even more complicated when some decisive action from Buzz leaves the entire crew of their turnip-shaped spacecraft stranded there indefinitely.

Buzz is intent on righting his wrong, trying again and again to travel back home by hyperspeed — the velocity needed to get the entire crew to jump through space. He gets closer with every attempt, but still faces the nagging problem of the unbreakable relationship between time and space. Each of Buzz’s trips are just minutes for him, but they’re four years for his marooned friends, all of whom are aging normally. Buzz doesn’t see a problem with this because he sees sacrifice as virtuous (it’s one of the qualities that makes him similar to Chris Evans’s other major Disney character, Captain America). This is, in fact, the Buzz Lightyear we know and love — one who is brave and loyal, and doesn’t always have the best ideas.

There’s a question implicit in the higher-budget, better-cast, more winking IP adaptations. You can feel it in The Lego Movie , in many of Disney+’s TV series, in the stills for Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie film. Sure, it seems to say, this is a project based on a familiar intellectual property, made to almost-surgically extract dollars from the wallets of longtime fans … but can’t it still be creative? Isn’t it still fun?

Lightyear ratchets that up yet another notch. The whole premise of Lightyear is that the Buzz Lightyear action figures in Toy Story were actually just promotions for this movie; that this film is not just the IP we know and love but something more authentic. Lightyear is, according to Disney-Pixar’s retrofitted storyline, the actual real-deal story. And in a creative landscape devoted to ransacking the past, isn’t this a pretty clever idea?

This is slightly complicated by a sensibility in Lightyear that, as an audience, we’re smart enough to understand the way money-grabs work. It’s hard to take Disney’s smirking critique about consumerism too seriously because Disney is the force that it pretends to laugh at.

The very many movies in the Toy Story franchise are about how these cookie-cutter toys actually are individuals with human feelings that aren’t disposable. This nifty caveat allows for new Lightyear merchandise and Toy Story toys, plushies, tents, and costumes to exist side by side in Disney’s stores .

Lightyear is very much mining existing nostalgia and brand name to pad its box office haul. Depending on its financial success, there may be several more Lightyear movies in the future. The ability to keep churning out Buzz Lightyear content is especially convenient for Disney since 2019’s Toy Story 4 was supposed to be the end of the Toy Story movies.

But the funny thing is: There’s plenty in Lightyear that’s good enough to stand on its own. It didn’t need to be about Buzz Lightyear. “Brave and loyal without the best ideas” could apply to lots of characters. It’s Buzz’s friendships that make this movie.

First, with Alisha. While Buzz reacts to tragedy by trying to force correction, Alisha adapts. She leads the rest of the crew in creating a home for themselves on this new planet: constructing buildings and living spaces, building labs to cultivate resources and sustenance, and learning to defend against the planet’s very large bugs. Scientists and architects and engineers thrive.

Alisha also starts her own life.

She begins to date a fellow crew member, which blooms into romance. As the years tick by, Alisha and her partner have kids and their kids have kids. Buzz, who returns as often as a leap year, misses out on so much of her life.

Alisha doesn’t resent him. She knows her best friend needs to try to save his crew — even if they might not need saving, given how well they’ve adapted. She understands that Buzz will keep charging into space four years at a time, so she gives him a robot cat named Sox (Peter Sohn) to keep him company.

Eventually, Buzz’s final space run is successful and he has the solution to get everyone home! But unfortunately Buzz returns 22 years into the future, and his adopted planet is now under siege from a robot threat. Buzz and Sox are the colony’s best hope, but also find themselves responsible for Alisha’s sunny, but extremely green granddaughter, Izzy (Keke Palmer), and her companions, the cowardly Mo Morrison (Taika Waititi) and octogenarian ex-con Darby Steel (Dale Soules). It’s time for the lessons of friendship, round two.

Izzy, her ragtag crew, and Buzz inevitably teach each other about heroism and life — the kind of lessons that Pixar is so adept at telling. These emotional beats are hit so precisely, Pixar should think about charging its competitors for the clinic. Buzz will grow a heart. Izzy will learn more about her grandmother. Sox will learn to love despite his android circuitry.

Lightyear ’s conclusion telegraphs another movie: Buzz, Izzy, Sox, and all the friends they made are strapped in and prepared to fly into hyperspeed. And while I’m sure it’ll be a great time, I’m just a little more hesitant about joining along.

The appeal of Buzz Lightyear — the toy and now the astronaut — has been that the character dares to dream despite an entire world telling him it isn’t practical. His existence is supposed to be a testament to endless possibility, and his adherence to it is so stubborn that it borders on frustrating. Lightyear gives us a fleeting glimpse into that, but this good-enough movie isn’t the slightest bit concerned with the unknown. There’s no thought to mapping out a future for the character that feels the slightest bit surprising or inventive, especially compared to the places that the original Toy Story took him.

The box office might go to infinity, but we’ll never get anything beyond the limits of intellectual property.

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Lightyear’s a stiff-as-plastic deconstruction of heroic space dramas

Lightyear’s a visual stunner with a predictable story.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

Share this story

Pixar and Disney have hyped director Angus MacLane’s Lightyear up by making it out as a mysterious reworking of Toy Story ’s canon that reveals all-new details about Andy Davis’ favorite space explorer . Though a new version of Buzz anchors the film, its story about how reaching for the stars can lead to people losing hold of the important things right in front of them is actually more about taking its titular astronaut off a pedestal and unpacking why we tend to frame people like him as heroes.

Lightyear tells the story of Buzz (Chris Evans), one of the headstrong Galactic Rangers of Star Command who’s committed his life to the organization’s exploration of deep space. After years of working closely only with his commanding officer Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), Lightyear’s left convinced that it simply isn’t safe (or really worth it) for him to partner up with newbies to the force, an assumption that ends up spelling disaster for them all. Though no one’s fatally injured when Buzz decides that he doesn’t need help during a routine mission, an accident leaves him and countless others stranded on a strange planet, and on some level everyone knows who’s to blame for their misfortune.

Rather than tiny green aliens who think with a hive mind and worship a claw in the sky, Buzz’s guilt is what haunts him as Lightyear opens and zooms in on the space hero as he searches for a way to put right everything that’s gone wrong. Though everyone on the strange planet wants to go home, no one explicitly tries to saddle Buzz with guilt about their being marooned. And because they’re all highly trained survivalists, it isn’t long before they begin to build a colony.

But for Buzz, a lantern-jawed boy scout with a penchant for dramatically narrating his mission logs, moving on with his life would be tantamount to admitting failure — something he refuses to do.What drives Buzz as Lightyear kicks into gear is his sense that, if he simply keeps trying on his own to solve a problem involving unstable fuel sources, he alone can save himself and his fellow Galactic Rangers from having to tough it out on a planet full of murderous plant life.

Most everything about the way Pixar renders Lightyear ’s lush and vibrant alien world at first makes it seem like the movie will focus on Buzz and Alisha encountering strange creatures they’re unsure of how to deal with. There is some of that spotlighted in Lightyear ’s action sequences. But its story is much more keen on following Buzz’s obsessive quest to prove himself, which feels much more in line with films like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Ridley Scott’s The Martian .

A significant chunk of Lightyear ’s runtime is spent following Buzz as he rockets off into space hoping to use a nearby sun’s gravitational pull to slingshot himself back to the stranded Star Command base in hopes of figuring out a way for them to return to their home planet. Before Lightyear really gives you a chance to get to know Buzz and Alisha’s dynamic, or really what it’s like working for Star Command, the movie quickly makes clear that it truly is a movie more about Lightyear himself than anything else. With each of Buzz’s trips into space, he loses a number of years due to the way time dilates for those moving at incredibly high speeds, and every return to Star Command’s ever-growing colony is a reminder that his life’s passing him by.

Lightyear makes this reality abundantly clear to the audience, but Buzz can’t really bring himself to see the truth of things until he comes face to face with Alisha’s granddaughter Izzy (Keke Palmer) and Sox (Peter Sohn), a Star Command issued robotic cat, after a handful of his trips lead to decades passing. For all the charm that Evans and Palmer bring to their performances, they never quite manage to make either Buzz or Izzy feel like people who’d actually enjoy spending time together, even though their burgeoning friendship is meant to be the emotional center of the movie.

In Izzy, Buzz sees the passage of time, and his decision to forego carving out a new life for himself alongside his fellow Galactic Rangers. Lightyear repeatedly puts Buzz and Izzy in situations meant to push both of them to recognize how working together’s both beneficial to them as individuals and in line with Star Command’s idea what what makes for good explorers. But even though the movie is consciously trying to illustrate how Buzz’s tendency to take matters into his own things isn’t always the best idea, it can’t stop itself from hitting many of the same beats as the exact kind of movies that it’s trying to comment on.

As occasionally uninspired as Lightyear tends to feel, the movie is also a visual triumph for Pixar and Disney, who’ve managed to translate the whole design lexicon surrounding Toy Story ’s original Buzz into an aesthetic language that reads as lived-in.

By the time that Lightyear gets around to introducing its true villain and their dastardly plan that underscores many of the movie’s larger existential ideas, you can easily see why Disney decided to run with the “what if Buzz Lightyear was a real guy” conceit and how the studio could return to this reality-within-a-reality down the line should the new Buzz prove to be a hit. What’s harder to tell is whether Lightyear ’s moments of visual strength will end up being enough to sell people on the idea of sitting down for a big, flashy, but ultimately formulaic spin-off about a guy who acts like a toy learning to get out of his own way.

Lightyear also stars Taika Waititi, James Brolin, Dale Soule, Mary McDonald-Lewis, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. The movie is now in theaters.

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Lightyear review: an exciting & heartwarming origin story for buzz.

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Lightyear is a clever expansion of Pixar's beloved Toy Story franchise - packed with fun moments, warm sentiment, and downright gorgeous animation. A prequel story (of sorts),  Lightyear  introduces audiences to the "original" Buzz Lightyear — a character who feels both familiar and fresh at the same time. While fans might have worried that Lightyear would in some way undermine Tim Allen's clueless Space Ranger, Buzz the movie character doesn’t feel at odds with Buzz the toy. The film actually manages to reflect shared insecurities and arrogance in a way that makes both variations of the hero more nuanced and rich as a result. While it's certainly not the studio's most original film, it's an impressive and well-executed evolution of Toy Story as a storytelling platform.

A simultaneous franchise spin-off  and in-universe prequel to the Toy Story franchise, Lightyear is the origin story of animated astronaut Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Chris Evans), the "movie" hero on which Andy Davies' Space Ranger action figure was based. The new film sees pilot Lightyear attempt a brazen escape from man-eating plants on a dangerous plant, only to strand a ship full of colonists as well as his crew — robotic cat Sox (Peter Sohn), Commander Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), and Diaz (Efren Ramirez) — far from Earth. Punishing himself for his failure, Lightyear hatches a rescue plan that, in the process, attracts the hero's future nemesis: the ruthless and powerful Emperor Zurg (James Brolin). To save his people from annihilation, find a safe way home, and defeat Zurg, Lightyear must confront his past and seek help from a rogue group of aspiring Space Rangers (voiced by Keke Palmer, Taika Waititi, and Dale Soules).

RELATED:  Lightyear Suggests Toy Story Will Break A Massive Box Office Record

Following the Toy Story  franchise's $3 billion-plus box office run — and not one, but two satisfying end points for the series — Pixar has developed a shrewd loophole that expands the Toy Story universe (and merchandise machine) without undermining the already finished story of Andy's beloved toys. Lightyear is directed by Angus MacLane ( Finding Dory  co-director), who takes on the ambitious task of developing a movie so exciting, so heartwarming, and so cool that it would turn Buzz Lightyear into the most sought-after toy of 1995. To that end, MacLane succeeds, forging a Buzz that both honors what came before and feels in-sync with the toy's worldview and nuance, all while simultaneously opening the hero up to an infinity of new adventures and self-discovery.

Chris Evans walks a delicate line with his take on Buzz and the character is everything he needs to be: A likable hero, bursting with bravery, loyalty, self-confidence and charm. Evans draws from, but doesn't lean on,  Allen's iteration of the Space Ranger . The film is packed with connective tissue that informs what  Toy Story  Buzz would come to say and do later on. But with a thoughtful performance from Evans, each reference is laced with heart and provides value to Lightyear's  narrative (not to mention crowd-pleasing fun). These are not hollow Easter eggs or one-liners that steal attention or overstay their welcome.  Lightyear 's story moves fast, leaving nothing extraneous to slow it down. In fact, moviegoers may leave the theater wishing MacLane had padded the film with another ten minutes in runtime to allow for a bit more world-building.

The first act leans on a montage to establish Buzz's numerous attempts at correcting the mistake that left his people stranded and the third act rattles off a lot of exposition and scientific mumbo jumbo that many viewers may struggle to fully understand — especially since  Lightyear  isn't all that preoccupied with connecting every dot. It is only in the second act that MacLane pauses long enough to flesh out the film's supporting cast beyond thin caricature. Buzz's rookie space ranger friends are mostly comedic relief, each defined by a single flaw or fear they're on track to overcome by the end of the movie. They're all entertaining foils for Lightyear; yet, compared to other Pixar characters, they're on the forgettable side. Sox is the one exception, as the robotic feline companion is packed with surprises (literally) and steals every scene in which he's featured.

Veteran sci-fi fans (and new viewers alike) will appreciate Lightyear 's animation style, which stops short of trying to be the most realistic looking Pixar film to date. Instead, it draws visual aesthetics from 1970s science fiction films, comics, and TV where, although space is dark and grungy, the universe is filled with mysterious creatures and unearthly discoveries. MacLane balances that juxtaposition well, producing an experience that portrays blinding optimism one moment and oppressive darkness the next.

Note: Lightyear is playing as an IMAX experience and for moviegoers who are interested in a premium ticket, the cost of an IMAX admission may not be essential, but is worth the price. Especially considering that Buzz's origin story is the first animated movie in history to take advantage of IMAX's 1.43:1 ratio (for select scenes).

While it has shortcomings, most notably that Lightyear  relies on its iconic main hero (and the foreknowledge that fans have of him) rather than a unique and inventive narrative packed with memorable supporting characters, MacLane's origin for Buzz is a welcome addition to Toy Story universe canon. It's a good way for Disney to utilize its beloved toy heroes (without undermining the well-received endings to Toy Story 3 and Toy Story  4). And should it prove successful (which it will), it'll be interesting to see if Lightyear leads to other in-universe origin films for Andy's numerous toys, such as a CG animated western  for Woody. As it is,  Lightyear is a clever film, one that is sure to please young moviegoers and veteran Toy Story series fans alike.

NEXT:  Why Lightyear Has Recast Zurg's Voice Actor From Toy Story 2

Lightyear  releases in theaters on June 17. The film is 105 minutes long and is rated PG for scenes of action/peril.

Disney Pixar branches the Toy Story franchise off with Lightyear, a story that centers around a human version of the Buzz Lightyear toy and his missions with Star command. Set during an exploration mission, Lightyear and his crew are attacked during a scouting mission by alien lifeforms and find themselves stranded on an unknown planet. To help get everyone home, Lightyear volunteers on a dangerous mission to test pilot their means home. However, each test light passes time and the characters age in his absence.

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Review: Pixar’s ‘Lightyear’ goes to adequacy and not beyond

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In at least one respect, “Lightyear” can claim some distinction: It’s the first Pixar movie ever to be cited as a Pixar character’s favorite movie. There’s more than just brand inflation at work here (though there is also that). In the original “Toy Story,” you’ll recall, a boy named Andy received an action figure of Buzz Lightyear, an intrepid space explorer with pop-out wings, a red laser pointer and an air of genial self-importance summed up by an instant-classic catchphrase (“To infinity … and beyond!”). Now, at the beginning of “Lightyear,” we learn that prized toy was a piece of promotional merchandise for Andy’s favorite film, and that film happens to be “Lightyear” itself.

This is a neat bit of chronological reverse-engineering, a clever way of disguising a feature-length “Toy Story” tie-in as its opposite. It also raises some interesting but probably ignorable questions. Like, what about “Buzz Lightyear of Star Command,” the Disney spinoff series that aired in the early 2000s? Also, why does “Lightyear,” an animated feature supposedly made prior to 1995, look this shiny and state-of-the-art? Shouldn’t it look more like — well, like “Toy Story,” speaking of ’95 releases?

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A certain aesthetic modesty suited that early Pixar classic, which took place in a couple of suburban kids’ bedrooms and featured an ensemble composed mostly from plastic and fabric. And if “Toy Story’s” visuals seem dated now, especially compared with more recent Pixar movies, that can only have deepened its message about how the things we loved as children inevitably change, because we of course change.

It will be interesting to see how “Lightyear” itself holds up in a quarter-century — just fine, I imagine, and indeed, “just fine” sums up the movie as a whole. Though visually grander and more cosmic in scale than the “Toy Story” quadrilogy, its story feels thinner and more generic. The script, written by Angus MacLane (who makes his feature directing debut here) and Jason Headley, tosses off a few gently mind-bending twists but otherwise rests comfortably within an accessible, highly allusive branch of family-friendly science fiction.

The Buzz Lightyear we see is recognizably Buzz Lightyear, though despite his familiar computer-animated contours, he’s clearly human rather than plastic, with a squarer jaw, more expressive eyes and a full head of brown hair beneath his purple balaclava. (He also speaks in the deeper-than-usual voice of Chris Evans, channeling some of Captain America’s get-it-done spirit while nicely approximating the timbre of a younger Tim Allen.) This is no toy story, in other words, even if one of Buzz’s many sidekicks is a talking cat robot named Sox (voiced by Peter Sohn).

But that’s getting ahead of the plot, which already boasts so many temporal loop-de-loops that it frequently gets ahead of itself. During a long Space Ranger mission, Buzz takes an unplanned detour and winds up crash-landing his ship and a sizable raft of humanity on an unfriendly planet. There, hostile giant insects swarm about, and hungry, tensile vines are forever threatening to drag outsiders beneath the otherwise barren surface. Buzz, who blames himself for this turn of events, is determined to get everyone home; to do so, he’ll need to harness a rare crystal-based fuel source that will enable the requisite leap to hyperspeed.

Testing this fuel will require Buzz to fly a series of missions, each one lasting only four minutes for him but, due to some clever time-dilation principles, a few years for those waiting patiently for him back on terra firma. And so, like the brave astronauts in “Interstellar” — or the unwitting young time traveler in “Flight of the Navigator” — Buzz must grapple with the painful conundrum of aging more slowly than those he loves. Chief among these is Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), his fellow Space Ranger and closest confidante. She’s granted an accelerated blip of a life story — over six decades she finds a wife, has a son and becomes a grandmother — that achieves some of the emotional sublimity of the “Married Life” montage from “Up.”

In this case, though, the poignancy derives from the fact that Buzz misses out on almost all of it, being too absorbed with his mission to open his eyes and appreciate the living of life and the passage of time. (It also derives from the welcome presence of a significant Black LGBTQ character in a studio-animated feature, another reason why “Lightyear” doesn’t seem terribly 1995.) And so, despite the grandeur of this movie’s cosmos — at once vast and derivative enough to trigger memories of “2001,” “Star Trek,” “Gravity” and, yes, “Wall-E” — “Lightyear” ultimately hews to a thematic rubric that Pixar fans will recognize from the more earthbound worlds of “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles” and “Inside Out.” Like those earlier classics, it’s both an adventure and an ego check, a reminder that true heroism means learning to relinquish control, embrace unpredictability and recognize the value of others.

One day in a different universe, of course, action figure Buzz Lightyear will teach a cowboy doll named Woody some of those same lessons. In “Lightyear,” they are imparted by a ragtag team of misfits determined to aid Buzz in his mission, including a friendly bumbler (Taika Waititi), a crusty ex-con (Dale Soules) and Alisha’s granddaughter, Izzy (Keke Palmer), untested but eager to prove herself worthy of the Hawthorne Space Ranger legacy. And yes, there’s also Sox, a futuristic emotional-support animal designed to ease Buzz’s trauma, and also to bring doses of whimsy and cuteness — to strike a note of “aww” — amid all the noise and action.

Of which there is quite a lot, in keeping with the zippy, high-energy Pixar brand. There are robot armies, laser shields, zero-gravity adventures and more stolen jets than in “Top Gun: Maverick.” There is also Buzz’s famous purple-armored nemesis, the evil Emperor Zurg (voiced by James Brolin), whose underlying motivation here turns out to be a pretty good surprise. To the extent that anything in “Lightyear” can really be called surprising, that is. It’s a film of modest charms and secondhand pleasures, enough to help pass a summer afternoon, if not to quell the sense that it was made for less-than-creative reasons. I do hope Andy eventually saw “Ratatouille.”

'Lightyear'

Rating: PG, for action/peril Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes Playing: Starts June 17 in general release

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Content Caution

In Theaters

• June 17, 2022
• Chris Evans as Buzz Lightyear; Keke Palmer as Izzy Hawthorne; Dale Soules as Darby Steel; Taika Waititi as Mo Morrison; Peter Sohn as Sox; Uzo Aduba as Alisha Hawthorne; James Brolin as Emperor Zurg; Mary McDonald-Lewis as I.V.A.N.; Efren Ramirez as Diaz; Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Commander Burnside

Home Release Date

• August 2, 2022
• Angus MacLane

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• Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Positive Elements   |   Spiritual Elements   |   Sexual & Romantic Content   |   Violent Content   |   Crude or Profane Language   |   Drug & Alcohol Content   |   Other Noteworthy Elements   | Conclusion

Movie Review

In 1995, we met a boy named Andy and his two favorite toys: Woody and Buzz Lightyear. The latter, of course, was the star of Andy’s favorite movie. “ This ,” Lightyear tells us before the story commences, “is that movie.”

In uncharted space, 4.2 million light years from Star Command, Buzz and his fellow Space Ranger Commander Alisha Hawthorne detect lifeforms on an uncharted planet.

Think they’re going to just fly by? Are you kidding?

After landing on the planet, the two of them—joined by a nameless, wide-eyed rookie recruit—set off to explore the swampy, vine-entangled world. “Rookies don’t help,” Buzz grouses. “They overcomplicate things.”

Still, Buzz isn’t one to miss a teachable moment. And as they step out onto the planet’s surface,  Buzz reminds our anonymous young recruit what it means to be a Space Ranger: “Respect the suit. Protect the universe. Finish the mission—no matter the cost.”

That’s about five seconds before wildly aggressive plants erupt from the planet’s innards and everything goes haywire. The vines almost drag our intrepid trio to doom nearly pull their ship—filled with 1,200 crewmembers—into the muck as well.

But Buzz Lightyear’s not about to stopped by a bunch of vines. Not on a good day, anyway. Then again, today’s not a good day for Buzz. Refusing the rookie’s help, Buzz leaps back on the craft and pulls back on the ship’s stick as hard as he can, trying desperately to get safely airborne.

It’s not enough: The enormous craft clips a cliff … and crashes.

Our heroic Space Ranger is utterly determined to “finish the mission—no matter the cost.” But he’s got an important lesson to learn: Sometimes, you can’t finish the mission all by yourself, no matter how many years you give it your all.

Especially when evil robots show up.

Positive Elements

Lightyear quickly shows that Buzz’s defining character trait—his indefatigable determination to solve problems and to rectify a terrible mistake—is also his biggest character flaw. Buzz will go to any length to right a wrong he’s committed. But depend on others for help? Well, that’s a lesson he learns very slowly.

Once Buzz and his cohorts settle into the reality that they’re marooned on a dreadfully organic planet (those nasty vines keep grabbing people), they set about brainstorming a way to repair their starship. That involves re-engineering a special hyperspeed fuel that Buzz alone keeps testing in small, fighter-like spacecraft aboard the mothership. So far, so good.

But with each attempt Buzz makes to test the fuel, Einsteinian physics kick in. Though Buzz approaches lightspeed for only a few minutes, years are passing back on the unnamed planet where his compatriots are shipwrecked. “Time dilation,” it’s called, an escapable reality, we’re told, of lightspeed physics.

In his final test run, some 62 years pass back on the planet. Buzz returns to find a whole new generation hunkered down under a laser shield and under assault from the robot minions of someone called … Emperor Zurg.

To repel them, Buzz will have to depend on the ability of a ragtag outpost of Space Ranger trainees stranded at a remote base near where Buzz crash lands: Izzy Hawthorne (his original Space Ranger partner’s granddaughter), Darby Steel (an elderly woman with a penchant for blowing things up) and Mo Morrison (a soft-spoken man ill-equipped for the rigors of being a soldier). Finally, Buzz has an intrepid “pet” cat, a robot named Sox, whose myriad abilities help keep the story moving forward as well.

Buzz, as noted, never lacks in the courage department. But gradually, his motley crew of trainee teammates helps him realize that he can’t do everything alone. And they exhibit plenty of courage and a willingness to sacrifice along the way, too.

A bigger question the movie asks ultimately revolves around how much we strive to change our circumstances and how we sometimes need to make peace with reality—even if that looks different than we’d hoped.

Spiritual Elements

Sexual & romantic content.

After one of Buzz’s hyperspeed testing runs, he returns to find that Alisha Hawthorne has gotten engaged. “What’s her name?” Buzz asks, implying that Alisha’s same-sex attraction has never been a secret to Buzz or anyone else. Her name , Alisha says, is Kiko . Later, we see the two women kiss to celebrate their 40 th anniversary.

Even though Buzz laments the fact that everyone on the ship is marooned because of his mistake, Alisha tells him, “I wouldn’t have met [Kiko] if we hadn’t gotten stranded.”

After one of Buzz’s next testing runs, he returns to find that Alisha is quite visibly pregnant. How Alisha is pregnant, given the fact that she’s married to a woman, is never explained.

Buzz’s last testing trip, as noted, correlates to more than six decades of time passing back on the planet, skipping an entire generation. We then meet Izzy Hawthorne, granddaughter of Alisha, who refers glowingly to her “two grandmas.”

I’ll return to some of the important implications of this same-sex relationship in the Conclusion.

Violent Content

Zurg and his robotic lackeys pursue Buzz and Co. for much of the movie. Myriad shootouts result in discombobulated robots and near misses to Buzz’s crew.

Robot appendages get blown off. Spacecraft battle and crash. Explosions and pursuit abound. Characters get temporarily swallowed up by vines that pull them below the planet’s surface.

All of this action has a very Star Wars -lite kind vibe to it. That said, Zurg and his menacing robots do have an ominous frowning red visage. Young or very sensitive children could be frightened by some of the more tense pursuit scenes.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear one use of the exclamation, “Shoot.”

Drug & Alcohol Content

Other noteworthy elements.

When Buzz points his finger at Izzy and says, “To infinity and beyond,” she has no idea what he’s doing and asks, “Do you want me to pull your finger?” There are some gags about Mo needing to use a space sickness bag. “Do not vomit inside the vehicle,” Buzz warns him sternly.

As the story’s timeline stretches into many decades, new leadership isn’t interested in Buzz finishing his mission. But Buzz steals a ship to try to make it happen anyway.

If I were going to title this review conclusion, I’d call it, A Tale of Two Lightyears .

On one hand, Lightyear is exactly what we’d expect from the creative gang at Pixar who brought us Toy Story nearly three decades ago. Not only does this prequel deliver a rollicking sci-fi origin story, it winks lovingly at many classic films from the genre along the way. Older fans will smile at nods to films such as 2001 , The Black Hole , Wall*E , Star Trek , Star Wars , Battlestar Galactica , Apollo 13 and—of course— Toy Story .

Along the way, Lightyear tells an engaging, satisfying story about the fine line between determination and learning to accept others’ help. We’re also challenged to see that even when we think we’ve made irreparable, horrible mistakes, good can still come of them—even if that doesn’t look like what we’d initially planned.

Toilet humor and faux swear words are at a refreshing bare minimum here. The robots’ menacing gazes are almost the only thing, really, that might give parents of sensitive young ‘uns pause.

I wish that I could end my review here. But, alas, I cannot.

Earlier this year, controversy erupted in Florida when the state passed a law prohibiting teaching about LGBT issues to public school children from kindergarten to third grade. The law quickly came under fire from many in Hollywood and in left-leaning political circles. Pressure mounted on Disney to make a statement, since the company’s iconic theme park Walt Disney World resides in Orlando, Florida.

Disney didn’t initially respond. But according to multiple reports, Pixar reinstated a same-sex kiss in the film in response to the Florida law, using a film to comment on the political and cultural conversation and controversy about LGBT representation. Deadline.com’ s Dade Hayes writes:

“Pixar was one of the loudest voices criticizing Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s handling of the Florida bill, and said in a letter leaked to the press that the company had suppressed same-sex elements in Pixar projects.”

In recent years, we’ve witnessed growing inclusion of LGBT characters in movies and TV shows aimed at children. Disney has actually come under fire for being reluctant to participate in this trend.

Yes, we’ve had blink-and-you’ll-miss-it images of two moms with a child in the background, or verbal allusions to same-sex relationships. But Lightyear’ s depiction of a same-same relationship and multi-decade marriage catapults Disney to the vanguard of this cultural controversy.

To my mind, what’s most noteworthy here isn’t really the kiss that we see, but the fact that the film depicts everything around it as completely normal and unremarkable. Buzz obviously knows that Alisha is gay. The couple then gets married, has a child (the biological details there are never explained), and lives decades together, all without ever suggesting that this is anything other than how things are supposed to be.

This worldview is, pardon the pun, light years beyond LaFou’s giggling innuendo hinting at his attraction to Gaston in 2017’s Beauty and the Beast remake. Instead, it fully embraces a perspective on these issues in direct conflict with what Scripture teaches about the purpose and place of sexuality in marriage between a man and a woman.

For many fans of Pixar and Toy Story , Disney’s deliberate, intentional and political embrace of such a radical, activist position on this issue will come as an enormous disappointment. Buzz Lightyear is a beloved, iconic character. And apart from this issue, his origin is story is one that many families otherwise would have enjoyed.

But just as Disney feels it must take a particular stand on this cultural issue, many families with equally strong, sincerely held biblical convictions will likely choose to pass on Lightyear’ s advocacy of the LGBT agenda here.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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Common Sense Media Review

Buzz origin story is exceptionally animated and inclusive.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Lightyear is a Pixar-animated origin film for the character who inspired the Buzz Lightyear action figure from Toy Story . In the movie, space ranger Buzz (voiced by Chris Evans), his crew, and an entire spacecraft filled with people is marooned on an alien planet. Buzz's…

Why Age 6+?

The space rangers are attacked by sentient vines on an alien planet. The vines s

A character announces her engagement and is later seen holding hands and kissing

"Shoot," as well as mild bathroom humor when friends misinterpret Buzz sticking

Nothing on camera, but Disney-Pixar movies have tons of merchandise tie-ins incl

Any Positive Content?

Promotes teamwork, family, empathy, perseverance, and human connection. Also enc

Buzz is brave, thorough, determined, and loyal. He's committed to finishing his

Commander Alisha Hawthorne is Black and a lesbian; she's eventually shown with h

Teaches viewers about the power of teamwork and appreciating that even "rookies"

Violence & Scariness

The space rangers are attacked by sentient vines on an alien planet. The vines seem to swallow them. People build shields and use other tools/means to combat the hostile being on the planet. Zurg chases after Buzz and sends armed robots to capture him. Zurg personally wants to destroy Buzz. People fight robots with weapons, breaking the robots into pieces. Buzz fights with and outruns commanding officers who want to ground his mission.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A character announces her engagement and is later seen holding hands and kissing her wife at an anniversary celebration.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"Shoot," as well as mild bathroom humor when friends misinterpret Buzz sticking his finger out to say "To infinity and beyond" as a "pull my finger" joke.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Nothing on camera, but Disney-Pixar movies have tons of merchandise tie-ins including games, toys, apparel, and more.

Positive Messages

Promotes teamwork, family, empathy, perseverance, and human connection. Also encourages people to ask for help and value others' talents, even those of someone still new to a job or a mission.

Positive Role Models

Buzz is brave, thorough, determined, and loyal. He's committed to finishing his mission. Alisha is a courageous, caring, and encouraging commanding officer and friend. Izzy is eager to help and overcomes various obstacles to make a difference. Mo and Darby summon their courage and use their know-how to be part of Buzz's team.

Diverse Representations

Commander Alisha Hawthorne is Black and a lesbian; she's eventually shown with her Asian wife and their multicultural family. This is a milestone for Disney-Pixar, which has previously only hinted at this type of organic representation. Buzz's crew of helpers includes an older White woman, a culturally ambiguous man of color (voiced by Taika Waititi), and a young Black woman. Also body-type diversity.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Educational Value

Teaches viewers about the power of teamwork and appreciating that even "rookies" can make important contributions.

Parents need to know that Lightyear is a Pixar-animated origin film for the character who inspired the Buzz Lightyear action figure from Toy Story . In the movie, space ranger Buzz (voiced by Chris Evans ), his crew, and an entire spacecraft filled with people is marooned on an alien planet. Buzz's attempts to get everyone home end up transporting him far into the future, where evil robots controlled by Emperor Zurg ( James Brolin ) have taken over the planet. Sci-fi/action violence includes chases and weapons-based fights with robots, Zurg, and the planet's pesky vines. Positive diverse representation includes a Black lesbian supporting character who discusses her partner (and later wife) in a way that makes it clear that everyone supports her identity and relationship. This is a milestone for Disney-Pixar, which has only hinted at this type of representation in previous films like Finding Dory and Beauty and the Beast . Teamwork, perseverance, empathy, and courage are prominent themes, and the film encourages people to ask for help and value the talents that others bring to the table. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (43)
• Kids say (47)

Based on 43 parent reviews

Not worth the time or money

What's the story.

LIGHTYEAR begins with a reminder that, in 1995, a boy named Andy was given a Buzz Lightyear action figure from his favorite movie -- and this is that movie. (In other words, this movie is not the origin story of Andy's beloved toy and Woody's best friend: This movie is positioned as the reason the toy existed in the first place.) The Buzz in this movie (voiced by Chris Evans ) is indeed a Space Ranger who takes his missions very seriously. While he's investigating an alien planet with his commanding officer/best friend, Commander Alisha Hawthorne ( Uzo Aduba ), and a rookie who has a lot to learn about being a space ranger, sentient vines start entangling them and their spacecraft, and all 1,200 passengers end up marooned there. Trying to fix the spacecraft, Buzz volunteers to undergo a series of test flights (with help from a brilliant therapy cat robot named Sox) to see whether they're capable of achieving hyperspace and getting off the planet. But Buzz discovers that each flight costs him time -- four years or more. In between test flights, he reconnects with Alisha and her growing family (wife, son, and eventually granddaughter). But once the lonely and singularly focused Buzz finally breaks the hyperspace code, he finds that an army of killer robots and their leader, Emperor Zurg ( James Brolin ), are terrorizing the planet. Buzz must work with a misfit group of three inexperienced space ranger cadets -- eager young Izzy ( Keke Palmer ), kind Mo ( Taika Waititi ), and jaded explosives specialist Darby Steel (Dale Soules) -- to help defeat Zurg.

Is It Any Good?

With its fabulous animation, honorable hero, and lovable sidekicks, this tribute to a host of space adventures is a story of perseverance, teamwork, and friendship. This version of Buzz Lightyear is ideally voiced by Evans, who already has that perfect Captain America halo of courage, loyalty, and hard work. For him, finishing a mission is paramount -- even above his own comfort or sense of belonging. His relationship with Alisha/Commander Hawthorne is a highlight, because they have complementary strengths and trust and respect each other. Aduba does a lovely job of expressing the commander's concern, love, and humor for her space ranger partner/bestie. Similarly, Palmer, Soules, and Waititi are hilarious as the ragtag trio who test Buzz's ability to rely on others, ask for help, and act as a patient and encouraging team leader. And Peter Sohn 's scene-stealing portrayal of Sox the brilliant and candid robo cat is sure to delight viewers of all ages.

Director Angus MacLane impresses with the technical excellence of the movie's animation: Textured hair, Sox's fur, and the aggressive vines are as amazingly detailed as the epic landscapes of space and the planet on which all the action takes place. Composer Michael Giacchino's score is spot-on for '90s blockbusters, and the script tips its hat to nearly all of the big space-based films, from 2001 to Star Wars and back again. And Disney takes a big step forward (for them) on the representation and inclusion front by featuring a Black lesbian character. There's no coming out necessary for Commander Hawthorne; Buzz knows that his best friend's partner would be a "her," just as she knew he would need Sox because he'd end up lonely after all the time jumps. Animated movies need more organic inclusion, and Lightyear handles it in a natural way. Ultimately, although Lightyear isn't at the top of Pixar's "heartwarming" (and heartrending) scale, it's far more than the cash cow some viewers expected.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about whether Lightyear brings the Toy Story franchise to a satisfying conclusion. Do you think the movies feel complete, or would you want more Lightyear sequels?

What positive diverse representation did you notice in the movie? Why are representation and inclusion important?

What did you think about the violence and peril in the movie? Is it age-appropriate? Why, or why not? How much and what kinds of violence are OK for younger audiences?

Movie Details

• In theaters : June 17, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : September 13, 2022
• Cast : Chris Evans , Keke Palmer , Taika Waititi
• Director : Angus MacLane
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors, Indigenous actors, Polynesian/Pacific Islander actors
• Studio : Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
• Genre : Family and Kids
• Topics : Adventures , Friendship , Robots , Space and Aliens
• Character Strengths : Courage , Empathy , Perseverance , Teamwork
• Run time : 100 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG
• MPAA explanation : action/peril
• Award : Common Sense Selection
• Last updated : August 25, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

Toy Story (1995)

Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins

Toy Story 2

Toy Story 3

Toy Story 4

Disney pixar movies, space movies, related topics.

• Perseverance
• Space and Aliens

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Review: Chris Evans' Buzz is more fantastic than plastic in Pixar's spiffy 'Lightyear'

Instead of going to infinity and beyond, Pixar’s “Lightyear” has a more modest goal: to do something interesting and fun with an animated classic without doing “ Toy Story 5 .”

Directed and co-written by former animator Angus MacLane, the spiffy space adventure (★★★ out of four; rated PG; now streaming on Disney+ ) mostly works as an origin story for earnest space ranger Buzz Lightyear – the role originated by Tim Allen in 1995's “Toy Story” and voiced here (as a cartoon human and not a plastic dude) by Chris Evans . The erstwhile Captain America is a solid choice to headline what’s mainly a straightforward sci-fi action story bookended by a pair of existential crises that actually make this spinoff fly.

The opening title card explains what we’re dealing with here: “Lightyear” essentially is the movie that Andy, the boy from “Toy Story,” became obsessed with in ’95 and spawned the Buzz toy that Andy famously received for his birthday (and irked Woody mightily back in the day). So it’s Pixar's meta version of “Star Wars” but with more high jinks and pesky alien vines.

'Lightyear': Disney's latest features queer character, emotional same-sex kiss in first footage

The "real" Buzz is a spaceman who doesn’t like autopilots, rookies, or failing his duties. A mission into space to find an inhabitable planet and set up shop goes awry, and Buzz, his best friend/commander Alisha (Uzo Aduba) and their passengers become marooned on a hostile world 4.2 million light-years from Earth. Blaming himself, Buzz goes to extremes to fix this mistake and embarks on test flights to perfect a hyperspeed crystal that will help get everyone off this rock. But every trip, which takes him about four minutes, equals four years and two months for everyone else he knows, thanks to "time dilation," leading to life passing him by over several decades.

Alongside his movie-stealing robot cat companion Sox (Peter Sohn), Buzz finally does succeed in crafting a crystal that works but, upon his return to his temporary intergalactic home, finds the space colony overtaken by a robot army led by the evil Zurg (James Brolin). To combat this Darth Vader-y menace, Buzz teams with Alisha’s granddaughter Izzy (Keke Palmer) and her motley crew of cadets, who are nowhere near ranger-ready.

'Lightyear': New trailer for 'Toy Story' spinoff arrives with Buzz's hilarious robot cat

“Lightyear” gives new meaning to Buzz’s “To infinity and beyond” catchphrase and adds in some easter eggs that’ll make old fans smile but doesn’t go overboard with the “Toy Story” connections. It instead embraces a more cosmic “Bad News Bears” vibe as an exasperated Buzz wants to do everything himself and is forced to learn the importance of a crew who’s got your back. Composer Michael Giacchino’s score harks back to ’70s and ’80s sci-fi TV themes, the animation is downright phenomenal at times, Sox is totally the new Baby Yoda, and the narrative mines a lot of comedy at the expense of the overly serious Buzz.

As a cohesive whole, there are rough patches: “Lightyear” overall feels like a series of cobbled-together episodes that don’t always flow smoothly. And Buzz’s bits with his new crop of rangers – including flighty Mo (Taika Waititi) and weirdly old Darby (Dale Soules) – are sufficiently entertaining although they feel slight here. It starts as an introspective Pixar movie, then throws in a bunch of generic sci-fi adventures before remembering it's a Pixar movie again by the end.

Buzz’s friendship with Alisha, a caring queer character who starts a family and makes the most of a bad situation while her pal obsessively attempts to be a hero, gives “Lightyear” that piece of signature Pixar emotionality amid the cosmic derring-do. While Disney’s vaunted animation studio tries to have its astronaut ice cream and eat it, too – with a “Toy Story” movie that’s really trying not to be a “Toy Story” movie – there is that certain spark missing that you only find in its original fare like, say, “Turning Red.”

“Lightyear” is a crowd-pleasing effort that doesn’t shoot for the moon but manages to be a nostalgic blast anyway.

Review: 'Lightyear' sputters upon liftoff in Pixar's new Buzz Lightyear origin movie

Buzz Lightyear enters the time/space continuum in this mildly entertaining "Toy Story" spinoff.

Disney/Pixar's highly-anticipated " Lightyear " arrived in theaters this weekend, and where this prequel spin-off of the iconic "Toy Story" empire should have been an electrifying slam dunk, the event film comes across as a stiff piece of corporate entertainment that lacks heart and magic.

Pixar's endearing "Toy Story" quadrilogy, TV specials and shorts are a beloved part of pop culture since its CGI sorcery first crossed screens in 1995, becoming the world's first computer-animated feature film and spawning a billion-dollar franchise that families around the world have grown up with.

"Lightyear" is an ambitious time-travel adventure set outside that cinematic universe in a sense, as it depicts the actual movie that Andy saw to make him want a Buzz Lightyear action figure in the first place, a fact evidenced by the "Lightyear" movie poster tacked to his bedroom wall in the original film.

And if you didn't know that, the introductory text will refresh your memory for you!

Related: 'Beyond Infinity' launches deep into Buzz Lightyear's history on Disney Plus

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There's been much ado about the MCU's Chris Evans taking over for Tim Allen in voicing the confident Star Command hero , but it's all a lot of rocket exhaust as this is a different iteration of the character from the tie-in toy line that Buzz is a part of in the four "Toy Story" films. Plus, Chris Evans is much a greater box office draw than Tim Allen at this stage of the Hollywood game and Captain America's name on the "Lightyear" poster certainly won't hurt its appeal.

The structural problem here lies in preconceived notions of the character based on his blowhard antics in "Toy Story," which can’t be translated to form a likable identity in this meta film-within-a-film medium apart from the franchise’s own internal logic. 

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Promoted as a PG-rated children’s film that’s family-friendly, the time travel and time dilation plot points will be totally lost on most kids under 10 (which made up more than half the audience for my screening) and at times the jokes fall flat with no tonal consistency or esoteric wit to be found.

"Lightyear's" plot presents Buzz (Chris Evans) as a famous Space Ranger in Star Command as he crashes a spherical spaceship on the hostile world of Tikana Prime 4.2 million light-years from Earth. The crew of 1,500 disembarks and builds a habitable colony to survive while Buzz tries to recreate hyperspace fuel cells needed to return home via a series of experimental faster-than-light test flights.

Through the concept of time dilation, each failed flight skips ahead four years for everyone except Buzz. As he nears the threshold of hyperspace he ages far slower than the colonists whose lives are continuing at normal speed. During these temporal lapses his commander and friend, Alisha Hawthorne, (Uzo Aduba), gets married, has a child, and then a granddaughter. Over sixty years later, Buzz's robo-cat named Sox (Peter Sohn) figures out the correct formula for fuel stabilization but now so many decades have passed that nobody wants to leave Tikana Prime. 

Buzz disobeys orders of the new commanding officer and steals the XL-15 spaceplane that delivers him 22 years into the future where Emperor Zurg and his robot invasion force have now attacked the planet. The former Space Ranger must team up with Alisha Hawthorne's grown-up granddaughter, Izzy (Keke Palmer), and her two cadet friends, Mo Morrison (Taika Waititi) and Darby Steel (Dale Soules), to stop the evil Zurg (James Brolin) and his intimidating robots to free the colony.

There's no denying that the technical aspects of "Lightyear" are top notch, proving beyond infinity that Pixar is still the sterling standard in CGI animation and will be for decades to come. The outer space vistas, roaring rockets, alien spacecraft, and Zurg's invasionary robots are stunning and imaginative. Ingested as pure science fiction eye candy, it's all supremely addictive.

The Academy Award-winning Michael Giacchino ("Dune," "The Batman") delivers a wonderful score to add to his many Pixar soundtracks that include "The Incredibles" and "Up," and helmer Angus MacLane ("Finding Dory") provides solid directorial skills and propulsive pacing.  

But watching nearly 100 minutes pass in this "Toy Story"-related movie, I was prone to feel some charm leaking out of its colorful sci-fi balloon. The storyline felt sadly redundant and derivative at times, pieced together from other, better flicks. For that I blame the inert screenplay by Angus MacLane, Matthew Aldrich and Jason Headley, and partially a misguided sense of Disney accountants pawning this film off as part of the "Toy Story" legacy for financial gain. 

Up until the third act, when a WTF twist revolving around Zurg is revealed and the audience is left in a stupor trying to figure out by what mechanism of time and space distortion this plot choice was derived from, and bored toddlers wandered parent-less in the dark theater, this was an adequate spin-off, though stripped of its humor and trademark sophisticated Pixar gags. But this odd reveal should have been axed while still in the writers' room, if not for pure logic's sake, then at least to maintain the continuity between Buzz and Zurg that came in the films before it.

"Lightyear" is gorgeous to stare at but feels slightly generic in a modern world of entertainment offerings where epic science fiction and fantasy projects are now crowned kings. It's a film that revels in its mediocrity and never fully attains creative orbit, and that's a shame when considering how cherished the Buzz Lightyear character and all his fantastic foibles are. (Think about it, he even has his own theme park ride at Disneyland and Disney World!)  

The conundrum here is what to do when a sentient toy is more interesting than the actual source character? We'll leave that convoluted question to the wisdom of the universe to unravel.

Where we would have loved to see a film centering around the golden age of Star Command and their daring Space Rangers going through the academy and rising to galactic prominence, we're given a "wibbly wobbly, timey wimey" narrative and deconstruction of the character that will confuse young kids and make adults pine for the goofy charisma of the old Buzz Lightyear more than ever. 

Still, if you don’t think about the premise too hard and chase it down with a popcorn and frosty beverage, it just might be a suitable summer diversion for you to enjoy.

And yes, there are three fun post-credit scenes worth watching!

Disney/Pixar's "Lightyear" is now playing in theaters nationwide.

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Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Jeff Spry is an award-winning screenwriter and veteran freelance journalist covering TV, movies, video games, books, and comics. His work has appeared at SYFY Wire, Inverse, Collider, Bleeding Cool and elsewhere. Jeff lives in beautiful Bend, Oregon amid the ponderosa pines, classic muscle cars, a crypt of collector horror comics, and two loyal English Setters.

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Breaking news, ‘lightyear’ review: decent pixar snatches buzz from the toy chest.

Don’t wait for Woody. He’s not coming.

The new Pixar movie “Lightyear,” a spin-off of “Toy Story,” is all about Buzz. And it completely ignores that the “to infinity and beyond!” space ranger is best known as an inanimate object that sounds like Tim from “Tool Time.”

Like a more truthful Pinocchio, Lightyear has become a real boy.  

Once you accept that this movie has almost nothing to do with “Toy Story” and its three sequels, you’re in for an entertaining, if lackluster, Pixar adventure that hews much closer to “Star Trek” than “ Wall-E .” 

Running time: 100 minutes. Rated PG (action/peril). In theaters.

Director Angus MacLane’s film focuses on a flesh-and-blood Buzz Lightyear (Chris Evans) who is still a stubborn, cocky hero — only he is not owned by a 6-year-old boy named Andy and no longer pals around with plastic pigs. Resembling Maverick from “ Top Gun ,” Lightyear is a daredevil government pilot with a disdain for authority.

During a remote mission, Lightyear accidentally gets his large Enterprise-like spaceship with hundreds of humans aboard marooned on a faraway planet. And so he makes it his life goal to achieve “hyperspeed” in a small spacecraft, which would allow the crew to return home.

However, every time the astronaut makes a test run in outer space, the planet moves forward in time four years while he stays exactly the same. As he tries and tries to get the advanced tech to work, Lightyear comes back to discover that his friends are aging, having kids and dying around him. 

A moving scene depicting the rapid passage of time early in the movie is a dead ringer for the weepy marriage sequence in Pixar’s “Up.” 

When a vaguely evil dude takes over and decides to end missions to leave the planet, Lightyear goes rogue with the help of some ragtag aspiring rangers, including Izzy (Keke Palmer), with whom he has an unexpected connection. 

But the best character in this “Toy Story”-adjacent movie is, surprise surprise, a toy. He’s a robot cat named Sox, who is gifted to Lightyear to help him deal with the stress of his job. Sox, who gets almost all the film’s laughs, becomes a vital tool in defeating a foe, the Zurgs, that begin attacking the human settlement. Peter Sohn’s perfect voice for Sox is dryer than the Sahara.

As strong as the wind-up is, the whole tale is not as gripping, narratively or emotionally, as most recent Pixar films have been. The message — don’t be tunnel-visioned, work as a team — is hunky dory, but can be bogged down by too many convoluted science fiction elements. You find yourself not caring about the final destination, which is rarely a problem for the animation studio.

Nonetheless the CGI is handsome as ever, and it clips along. The movie is one of the better pieces of family entertainment released so far this year. 

One hundred minutes is plenty of quality time with Lightyear, though. Maybe instead of going to infinity and beyond with “Lightyear” sequels, Pixar should consider this a one-off.

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Movie Reviews

Life-lessons abound in 'lightyear,' an origin story about buzz from 'toy story'.

Bob Mondello

Buzz Lightyear flies to infinity and beyond in Lightyear, the fifth film in Pixar's Toy Story saga.

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