When his colony ship crash-lands on a hostile planet, he and his fellow officers discover that the crystals they use for fuel to travel at warp speed have been corrupted. In a way, it is, but it could have been so much more.īuzz Lightyear (Chris Evans) is a Star Command officer, a member of an elite force of astronaut adventurers who protect people from extraterrestrial threats. Pixar's newest film, the retro space opera Lightyear, feels like a return to telling the kind of story that made the studio great in the first place. Maybe everyone's just been in a more meditative, philosophical mood lately. Nowadays, though, with movies anthropomorphizing the bodiless concepts of emotions, souls, and, in an upcoming installment, classical elements, the studio weirdly seems like it's running out of ideas (with Domee Shi's utterly fantastic Turning Red being the exception).
They've always been meta even their earliest story concepts-a bunch of sentient toys compete for the attentions of a young boy, closet monsters work in a factory that harvests human screams, superheroes have been outlawed and relocated to the suburbs on government benefits-have a flair of the metatextual about them, taking simple ideas and expanding them into whole worlds. Pixar, the computer animation studio owned by Disney that revolutionized the way studios make movies for children, has gotten meta.
