This story about “Lightyear” first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Pixar’s “Lightyear” is built around a nimble, ingenious premise: Instead of just another entry in the “Toy Story” franchise, it is the movie that young Andy watched and became obsessed with the Buzz Lightyear character (here played by Chris Evans) before the events of the first “Toy Story” film. As envisioned by co-writer/director Angus MacLane, “Lightyear” is a muscular science fiction movie (MacLane’s professed favorite is “Aliens”) that also must exist within the preexisting framework of the “Toy Story” franchise and the cumbersome mythology that has already been established. One of the more delicious thrills of “Lightyear” is watching it bump up against the mythos and gleefully subvert the audience’s preconceived notions.
And nowhere is this push-and-pull greater than when Buzz comes face-to-face with Zurg, the movie’s big villain. The giant robotic suit opens up to reveal…Buzz. Not this Buzz, mind you, but an older Buzz (voiced by James Brolin) from a different dimension, one in which he let his relentless drive corrupt everything else. This, of course, is a deviation from the “Toy Story” canon, since “Toy Story 2” revealed that Zurg was Buzz’s father, the kind of nod to another pop-culture classic (in this case, “Star Wars”) that was popular in movies of the era.
Pixar did work on a version of Lightyear where Zurg was Buzz’s father, but that idea (which you can see on the digital release) were abandoned because the similarly themed “Ad Astra” opened while they were in production. “A lot of it comes down to how much value as an audience you have in seeing a person get into a fight with their father,” MacLane said.
Instead, MacLane used the sequence (and the idea of an evil, time-traveling Buzz) to zero in on one of “Lightyear’s” biggest themes. “One of the things that the movie is dancing around is how nostalgia can poison us into repeating ourselves or falling into the same rut over and over again,” MacLane said. “And being convinced that if we look backwards, the solutions we had in the past were better than the present that we have.” Also, he said, the idea of multiple Buzz Lightyears is something that is inherently “Toy Story”-esque. “I wanted to have echoes,” MacLane said.
As for the look of the scene, MacLane and his collaborators had some surprising inspirations. “Lighting-wise, it’s heavily influenced by ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ when Dreyfus goes inside the mothership,” said MacLane, who added that there’s a healthy amount of Japanese anime influence as well. During what he said was his “very first week at Pixar,” MacLane was one of the principle designers of Zurg when the character was first revealed in “Toy Story 2” — so just like Buzz, he was able to travel back and attempt a new solution. “The ‘70s super-robot had influenced the original Zurg,” MacLane said. “In the reimagining of it, it would be more real robot.”
The look of Old Buzz was a completely different model, inspired in part by the Evil Queen’s transformation into the crone in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and Julian Glover drinking from the wrong cup in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” “I imagine his dogged determination to fulfill the mission would cause him to stop eating,” MacLane said. “Still recognizable (as) the hero, but (with) a frailty. The years of obsession had driven him wild.”
Read more from the Awards Preview issue here.
