Film Review - Lightyear
Images courtesy of The Walt Disney Company.
Toy Story is a peculiar franchise. What they have done post-Toy Story 3 has always been a mystery, whether it’s Disney+ original shorts or depressing movies about your first love moving on. What nobody quite expected after Forky was an origin story, not for Buzz Lightyear the doll, but Buzz the intellectual property.
Lightyear is a zany reprisal of the Toy Story franchise: a kind of sequel since it’s based on pre-existing characters relevant to Andy, but obviously also a prequel because it’s the movie Andy watched in cinemas as a kid. So, what do we call it? I say a spin-off, but perhaps the audiences’ flooding cinemas over the coming days will say reboot.
In my preview session, the number of children was astonishing. So many kids, not enchanted by the premise of a sequel to a 20-year-old movie, but simply interested in a space man movie starring Captain America that can be enjoyed in a brisk 105 minutes. Now this brings up two points of interest in the movie for me…
First, how on earth Lightyear such a refreshing twist on the time travel movies we’ve seen recently, particularly in the Captain America franchise. I was slightly turned off by the idea of Lightyear, simply owing to the fact that big hero Chris Evans would again be reprising the role of another strongman, but although the character arc is remarkably similar, it retained the refreshment of a spaceman over a WWI soldier.
Second, can we discuss the fact that Toy Story has reached the Everest of franchises in the modern film era? You start with a franchise about Woody and mine that to dust, but what about Buzz? These geniuses at Pixar are rewinding the clock straight back to the movie theatre that inspired the Space Ranger merch. Once they’ve hit the end of this road they can just reach back again and make the arcade machine that inspired the martians. Limitless potential here folks.
Amazingly though, the material is given respect, and in spades. I mean, when Toy Story first launched, the movie brought Pixar into the limelight due to its immense graphical capability, and it seems as though a studio obsessed with nostalgia and referencing chose the same source material to propel themselves into the next generation of film-making. Lightyear is an absolute feat of digitised filmmaking and some of the best animation I’ve ever seen. Some of these scenes appear to be focus-tested on optimising whatever new technology the studio has and God bless whoever designed the landscapes, because this movie is gorgeous.
Lightyear is screening in cinemas from Thursday the 16th of June. For tickets and more info, click here.