Lightyear (2022)
Set in the canon of the Toy Story films, Lightyear is Andy’s favorite movie which he watched in Toy Story and acts as the origin story of Buzz Lightyear, the hero who inspired the toy.
Stardate 3901. A Star Command exploration vessel SC-1 (nicknamed the turnip) changes course to investigate signs of life on the unknown world T'Kani Prime. Woken from hibernation, Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear and his commanding officer and best friend Alisha Hawthorne explore with their new recruit, Featheringhamstan. They are forced to retreat to their exploration vessel after discovering that the planet hosts hostile lifeforms. The SC-1 sustains some damages, particularly to it’s hyperspace crystal, thus forcing the rest of the crew out of hibernation to conduct repairs as well as develop a new hyperspace fuel crystal to return home. Blaming himself for damages, Buzz volunteers as the test pilot for the hyperspace fuel crystal.
One year later, the crew has constructed a new colony to conduct repairs. However, after a four-minute test flight on the XL-01 with the accompanying autopilot I.V.A.N. (internal voice-activated navigator), Buzz finds that four years have passed on T'Kani Prime, due to the effects of time dilation from having traveled at relativistic speeds. Buzz is introduced to an orange robotic feline Sox and continues testing the hyperspace fuel (“Lightyear”). With every test, four more years pass on T'Kani Prime, until eventually over sixty-six years have passed. During the test, the colony develops, with Alisha raising a son with her wife Kiko, subsequently dying of old age, while Sox improves the fuel's composition, allowing it to obtain faster-than-light speeds.
Against the orders of Alisha's successor Commander Burnside, Buzz uses the new fuel composition for a successful hyperspace test in the XL-15. However, he skips another twenty-two years into the future during which T'Kani Prime has been invaded by Zyclops robots (who say B-Zurg) led by Zurg, the robots' commander, one week prior to Buzz returning. Buzz meets up with members of the colony's defense forces known as Zap Patrol (specifically the junior Zap Patrol), including Alisha's now-adult granddaughter Izzy Hawthorne, Mo Morrison, a fresh, naïve recruit, Darby Steel, an elderly paroled convict, and the robot DERIC. Together, they plan to enact Operation Surprise Party (a variation on Operation Thunder Spear)—destroy the Zurg's mothership which controls the robots, thus destroying the robots. While initially reluctant to work with them, Buzz eventually warms to them after they escape from a nest of insects and investigate a terillium mining facility to repair their ship. Buzz also learns how sandwiches have evolved from bread-meat-bread to meat-bread-meat and also learns of juicy fingers.
As they head back to the ship, Zurg intervenes and captures Buzz, then reveals himself to be an older version of Buzz from the original timeline, which split upon Buzz's return to the planet after the successful hyperspace test: without the robot army to detain them, soldiers from the colony attempted to arrest Buzz under Burnside's orders, forcing the original Buzz to flee into space. This Buzz and his Sox escaped at full speed and, via time dilation, flew hundreds of years into the far future, where he encountered extremely advanced technology. The original Buzz eventually developed a way to travel back in time to prevent himself from stranding the Star Command crew upon the planet. Since the Zyclops robots can’t say Buzz and can only say B-Zurg, original Buzz goes by Zurg. Having worn out his own fuel which only got Zurg back to the current events, Zurg needs fresh fuel to travel further into the past and complete his mission, so he requests it from his younger self. Realizing this would erase Alisha and Kiko's life together, along with Izzy and the lives of all the other colonists, Buzz refuses.
Aided by the original Sox, Buzz and the cadets escape Zurg's ship and set it to self-destruct however Zurg crushes the original Sox. On their return to the planet via a crash landing, Zurg attacks and takes the fuel for himself. Buzz ejects to shoot the fuel, causing an explosion that seemingly kills Zurg. With the fuel gone, Buzz finally accepts T'Kani Prime as his home. Burnside arrests the group with the intention of detaining them for their reckless actions, but relents in light of Buzz's bravery against the robot armada. Allowed to revive the Space Ranger Corps as the Universe Protection Division, Buzz unexpectedly selects Izzy, Mo, Darby, and Sox as his first trainees. With a new fuel crystal created using the computer left behind during the mutiny, Buzz and his team embark on a new adventure.
In a post-credits scene, Zurg is shown to have survived the explosion.
TRIVIA
Visual Style
The design is meant to be a kind of retro future, early ‘80s personal computing retro. Throughout the film—the knobs, the dials, the buttons are all very tactile.
The animation team went to NASA to research about spaceships, space suits and overall set pieces as they wanted "everything to look like a live-action film rather than an animation.
The planet of T’Kani Prime is designed with a jungle-like atmosphere where everything on the planet is trying to kill you; it’s a habitable planet but not a nice planet. It’s a tidally locked planet i.e. it orbits around its sun but it does not rotate itself. This makes a light side and dark side of the planet and where the SC-1 inhabitants set up camp is in the twilight part of the planet.
Star Command design aspects include rounded corners and rounded simple shapes with a “chunkiness & thickness” feel to it compared to the Zurg environment which has sharper shapes, oblique angles, and irregular polygons. The animators gave the film a "cinematic" and "chunky" look, evoking science-fiction films.
The Zyclops graphics are part of the overall Zurg approach. They all have graphics that fit in the Zurg design language and actually use the font that was created for Zurg.
Star Command ships and structures were used via kit bashing (i.e. taking model kits, breaking them apart, and creating ships/structures). Industrial Light & Magic as well as Lucasfilm allowed Pixar to use their kit of parts which gives a Star Wars look to it.
A model builder physically built the XL-01 ship which helped inform the whole design of the film which can be described as tactile. The model builder made ships from XL-01 to XL-15 and with each new ship, there were slight designs to portray how technology was advancing over time.
The director would create models from Lego which would incorporated into the vehicle design in the film.
The voice of I.V.A.N. is Mary McDonald-Lewis who is also the voice of OnStar—the onboard computer in many cars.