One side effect of a tagalong project like Lightyear is that even while the movie is rightly being shrugged off as another reheat, moments of real artistry will get overlooked. The animation in this Toy Story-adjacent adventure is astounding; with each new movie, the studio advances the art form in incremental ways. It’s not only the reverberating realism (the shimmer of a rocket as it hurtles around a star), but the eye for emotional detail (at one point a character reaches out to touch the hologram of an ailing friend and the friend’s outstretched finger trembles ever so slightly). Add a hilarious sidekick—SOX (Peter Sohn), an artificially intelligent cat assistant with some charmingly lo-fi features—and you have the makings of a decent Pixar picture, if not the most original of its offerings. With Chris Evans as the voice of Buzz Lightyear, necessarily lacking the delightful pomposity of Tim Allen considering this is supposed to be the “real” action hero on which the toy Buzz was based. That particular piece of intellectual-property squeezing gets fleshed out by screenwriters Angus MacLane, Matthew Aldrich, and Jason Headley. MacLane also directs.
(6/17/2022)
