The ‘real’ Buzz Lightyear of Toy Story gets Pixar origin movie
The “real and human” Buzz Lightyear of Toy Story gets the spotlight in Disney-Pixar’s first-ever sci-fi, action-adventure film Lightyear — and deservingly so.
If you’ve seen the Pixar Animation Studios 1995 megahit film Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear was introduced as a brand-new, much sought-after toy that gave vintage pull-string Sheriff Woody a run for his money as Andy’s favorite toy.
Some two decades later, animator-turned-director Angus MacLane found himself coming up with a movie that attempts to address “unanswered” questions about the origins of the now-iconic Buzz Lightyear and what is it about him that “inspired Andy to beg for a fancy action figure with lasers, karate chop action and aerodynamic space wings.”
“Lightyear is the movie that Andy, his friends and probably most of the rest of the world saw,” Angus said in the press notes, adding that “I wanted to make something that felt true to those fun, big-budget popcorn films.”
In Lightyear, the legendary space ranger goes on an intergalactic adventure and faces a huge challenge along the way, which as Angus described it, took inspiration from the sci-fi element of time dilation and the “character-out-of-time heroics of Captain America, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.”
In a Zoom roundtable interview with The STAR, Angus further explained, “I wanted the film to have a sense of excitement and propulsion of the action films and the sci-fi films of my youth, and it was a chance to do that. Like, I want to have a chase scene, an action scene, a spaceship battle, like what are all of the cool things that you would want in that kind of movie? That was really the goal… but through the lens of the Buzz Lightyear character.”
Apart from being an epic action-adventure film featuring spaceships and robots, the filmmaker also wanted the movie to have “interesting things to say about how we view our past and our present, and how we work with people or choose to do things on our own.”
Angus began his career at Pixar as an animator, working on successive films, from A Bug’s Life through Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, then as shorts director (Toy Story Toons: Small Fry) before transitioning to co-director on Finding Dory (with Andrew Stanton).
Back in 1995, Angus was also one of the many who saw the original Toy Story, a film that changed the 47-year-old director’s life along with Star Wars and sci-fi classics he devoured in his youth and childhood. In fact, he said that Lightyear is his love letter to cinema.
Meanwhile, Angus stressed that Lightyear features Buzz Lightyear as a real and human character, and not as a toy. “I wanted to tell something personal, something true and at the same time, I wanted to get to the heart of the Buzz Lightyear character,” he said in another virtual Q&A.
“Although I’d been working with Buzz Lightyear for the better part of two decades, it wasn’t until the development of this project that I was able to finally isolate what the unifying character trait was for everyone’s favorite space ranger.
“You see, Buzz Lightyear, as I discovered, is a character who is at odds with his surroundings. Or to put it another way, Buzz always has a disagreement over the nature of reality. In Toy Story, Buzz thinks he’s a space ranger. Woody disagrees. Toy Story 2, Buzz thinks he’s the Buzz Lightyear. The other Buzz Lightyear disagrees,” he said.
After identifying the core trait of Buzz, he felt they needed a universal truth to ground the story, and so, reflections about the life of an animator and the time required in producing animated films somehow served as influence.
So, Lightyear delved into “nostalgia for the past while rapidly jumping into the future. So, we pictured, we have a story where Buzz Lightyear would be traveling rapidly through time, and all because of a job. And because of that, as a result, you know, he’s separating himself from society and all of his loved ones. Just like the film industry. All joking aside, this felt like a natural film — a natural fit for Buzz as a hero out of time, a well-worn story in the science-fiction drama,” he said.
“Lightyear is a celebration of the movies and sci-fi epics in general, but it’s also inspired by the dark side of nostalgia and the dangers of living in the past. As a director, Lightyear is the movie I’ve always wanted to make, and as a filmgoer, it’s the movie I’ve always wanted to see,” he added.
Meanwhile, the person who helped Angus make his “dream come true” was seasoned producer Galyn Susman (Toy Story That Time Forgot). In the virtual roundtable chat, she said she was happy she got to produce Lightyear now even as they received reactions and questions as to why they didn’t get to do this sooner.
“So glad we didn’t do it earlier because I don’t know if we could give it visual justice,” she explained. “Doing it a decade ago… it would have been subpar.”
Like Angus, Galyn has a long history with the Toy Story franchise. In fact, she’s the woman credited for saving Toy Story 2 (1999).
According to the story, which came to light and went viral only last year, Toy Story 2 got accidentally deleted from Pixar servers, but the movie was restored after Galyn — a technical director at that time who had been working from home to attend to her newborn child — saved a backup copy on her home computer. The Pixar team managed to retrieve “almost all of the lost assets” and the movie was able to resume production.
Asked about it by The STAR during the roundtable interview, Galyn shared, “I have no idea why that came up, out of nowhere. I’m not on social media so my children let me know.
“But it’s just a story. I mean, it’s true that I had the film on my computer because I had a kid who was sick that day and I was supervising the VFX supervisor. But you know, it’s always a team sport here at Pixar. So yes, I have the computer but then everybody else jumped in and restored the film and put all the pieces together. It just makes for a better story.”
As for working with Angus anew through Lightyear, she said, “I knew whatever Angus was gonna do, I wanted to direct it. I mean, whatever he was gonna direct, I wanted to produce it.”
She added, “One of the things I learned over the years of producing Angus is that when he is surrounded by people with talent who also care deeply, magic happens. I guess that should be obvious, but I am a tech nerd. It took me a while to notice. So, we took great care to build an incredible leadership team for Lightyear.”
Plus, it’s always exciting for Galyn to be making a movie connected to Toy Story.
“And it’s always exciting to me to get the opportunity to make a movie… It’s particularly exciting to work on my favorite genre with the best talent on the planet, as far as I’m concerned. And you know, Buzz Lightyear is that aspirational character. He’s still growing. He’s fun to watch. It’s a blast. It’s really kind of mixing all the best things together,” Galyn said.
Lightyear features the voices of Chris Evans as Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear, Uzo Aduba as his commander and best friend Alisha Hawthorne and Peter Sohn as Sox. Keke Palmer, Taika Waititi and Dale Soules lend their voices to the Junior Zap Patrol’s Izzy Hawthorne, Mo Morrison and Darby Steel, respectively, and James Brolin can be heard as the enigmatic Zurg. Disney and Pixar’s Lightyear is now showing in Philippine cinemas.
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