EMPIRE 2022 PREVIEW
LIGHTYEAR
TOY STORY’S GALACTIC HERO IS BACK… BUT NOT QUITE AS WE KNOW HIM
OUT 17 JUN
Chris Evans will voice Buzz Lightyear in the origin-story movie.
THE SPACE RANGER Buzz Lightyear spends a good deal of 1995’s Toy Story convinced he’s more man than plaything, later suffering an existential crisis after realising he is, in fact, a mere toy. The sheer indignity! Now, though, Pixar is taking the character into an even more meta realm, exploring the real (well, you know) person that Buzz was based on. The actual Buzz Lightyear. Got it?
This is the core concept behind Pixar’s Lightyear, a leftfield way back to the movie’s universe that takes place in an entire other universe. Yet with the studio coming off a run of original films (taking in 2022’s Turning Red), why go back to the Toy Story well at all?
“Buzz is a character I’ve been attached to since I joined the studio in 1997,” explains director Angus MacLane, who worked as an animator on early iterations of Buzz, helped to design Evil Emperor Zurg, and directed some of the 2000 cartoon series Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command. “After I worked on Finding Dory [which he co-directed], I had this idea of, ‘Why don’t we just make the cool sci-fi movie that we would have wanted to have seen as kids? But with Buzz Lightyear as the character.’ What is the movie [Toy Story’s] Andy would have seen? Or a version of the ultimate, straightforward action-adventure —a serious sci-fi movie?”