3+1 Short Paragraphs: Lightyear

2022, Angus MacLane (co-director Finding Dory) -- Disney+ 

The Toy Story franchise should be coming to an end, some 30 years (!!!) after it hit the animation world with a bang, and yet... here we are with an origin story (??) for Buzz Lightyear. The premise of this movie is that we are watching the movie that was released in the early 90s that spawned the toy line from which Andy gets his Buzz Lightyear action figure. It makes me wonder if it was an animated movie, or a live action movie, but do animated movies really exist in a world that is animated? Either way, brilliant idea, but I was just wishing that the movie had a more early-90s scifi feel to it. Oddly enough, and a bit of a let down once I learned it, is that this premise was already used for the traditional animated TV series called Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins, which has the toys watching a VHS of said show, which itself is the inspiration for Buzz. So, they kind of ripped off their own idea?

So, THIS source movie has Buzz Lightyear, a ranger in Star Command, on a mission exploring unknown reaches of space, awakened from cryo sleep when the ship detects a nearby planet with life, ala the opening scenes from Alien. The planet does have life, and the few space rangers awakened to explore, soon discover it is hostile, mostly bugs and plant tentacles. Buzz attempts to control of the hostile response, as he is a man of action (!!!), but instead critically damages the hyper crystal that powers the ship, leaving them all marooned. He then takes it upon himself to lead each test of the locally made replacement hyper fuel, out a strong sense of guilt & duty. But each test runs into dilated time, and Buzz continues to return only a day later, but years pass on the planet, with all of his fellow, now all awakened rangers and explorers, growing up on the always hostile planet. Its a story opener, a long one, which is steeped in classic scifi story makeup, with not quite the emotional impact of the opening segment from Up but it tries.

The rest of the movie, and I don't recall if it was final act, or final two, is about Buzz's triumphant return to the planet, near a hundred years from when he started the tests, and she is a very very changed place. Everyone he knows is dead, and their ancestors are fighting a rather recent war against robots who showed up out of the blue. He ends up teaming up with a bunch of ranger rejects to save the day and have a final battle against Zerg, the leader of the robots, along with some Secret Spoiler Heavy Reveals. 

Part of me wanted to see a less Pixar animated style movie and something more serious, along the lines of the photorealistic animation Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or the shorts seen in Love, Death + Robots on Netflix. The tone in this movie kept on shifting from traditional Pixar humour to hints of more serious drama, which is in the Pixar wheelhouse, but I am not sure fit well enough into the Buzz Lightyear mythos. All in all, I did enjoy myself, just wanted.... more?