Pixar, the studio that has produced so many animated classics, has managed to do the unimaginable.  Somehow, they’ve taken one of their best known and beloved characters, Buzz Lightyear, and put him into a boring, generic science-fiction adventure.  On top of that, Buzz is no longer the officious-yet-funny blowhard.  Instead, he’s a person with no sense of humor and several troubling psychological tendencies.  In Lightyear, Buzz (voiced by Chris Evans) is a Space Ranger whose dislike of computers is matched only by his avoidance of help from others.  (Why?  Who knows.)  His single-mindedness nearly gets himself and everyone else killed, and from that point on, he’s fixated on undoing his mistake.  Buzz proceeds to spend years testing a new fuel cell that could get everyone back home, to the exclusion of all else.  Every test only lasts minutes for him, but years elapse for everyone else.  Best with failure after failure, he loses his only friend Alisha (Uzo Aduba) to old age.  (Yes, this is a children’s cartoon.)

Fortunately, his new companion, a computerized cat robot named SOX (Peter Sohn), helps him solve a problem with the fuel cell.  But first, Buzz must deal with Zurg and his robot henchmen.  Why is Zurg attacking the colony?  Why is Zurg hell-bent on capturing Buzz?  The answers may surprise you, especially if you’ve seen The Lego Movie: The Second Part.  Everything about Lightyear is surprisingly lazy.  With the exception of SOX, the jokes fall flat.  The science-fiction aspect is a timid riff on Interstellar.  The graphics are shockingly dull for a company that made Wall-E.  The morals of the story, about moving on from failure and accepting the help of others, have none of the emotional resonance of prior Pixar movies.  There may never have been a good reason to make Lightyear, but that’s no excuse for the result being this shallow and listless.  If cribbing from a Warner Brothers animated feature isn’t the equivalent of Pixar hitting rock bottom, I don’t know what is.  Pixar won Best Animated Feature not even two years ago for Soul.  How can this be the same studio?  Not recommended.  (Not even on Disney+)

Continue reading “Lightyear”