June 23, 2022 – The Toy Story franchise continues with the prequel, “Lightyear,” the origin story of one of its main characters, “Buzz Lightyear.” In the original “Toy Story” (1995) Buzz Lightyear is a popular toy, but in this film, he is more like a real person, at least in the sense of being a character living in an animated film. In the Toy Story universe, “Lightyear” is the film that inspired the Buzz Lightyear toy.

Buzz is piloting a ship which crashes while lifting off from a planet filled with hostile life forms. He feels responsible for crashing the ship and is determined to lead the attempt to get the ship repaired and get it and the crew off the planet. Attempts to achieve light speed repeatedly fail, however, and years pass. Buzz doesn't age much because of time dilation caused by near light speeds in his repeated test flights.

Years later, Buzz has become both a living legend and a relic, the last surviving Space Ranger. The children of the original crew have grown up and built a thriving colony on the hostile planet where Buzz and the original crew crashed. Buzz still wants to get the ship off the planet and back home, but to everyone else on the planet, this is home, and they no longer want to leave.

Buzz has a robotic therapy cat, Sox, given to him by his best friend, Alisha Hawthorne. Buzz does not like the cat at first, but it grows on him, and eventually it becomes a trusted companion. Over the years a kind of Space Ranger fan club has formed around the legend of Buzz Lightyear. The members of this Space Ranger club, including Izzy Hawthorne, the adult granddaughter of the late Alisha Hawthorne, want to be real space rangers, an occupation that no longer exists here.

When Buzz returns from one of his test flights, he finds that a hostile force of robots, led by the evil Zurg, are attacking the colony, and it is up to Buzz, Sox and the Space Ranger Club members to repel the attack and save the colony. He also runs into a nasty temporal paradox along the way.

As with the other films in the Toy Story series, it works on multiple levels, as a film suitable for both adults and children (despite the complexity of the story). Aside from the message that there is no place like home, there are also morals to the story, about the need for friends and family, and the importance of teamwork.

Strong characters are a hallmark of this series, and this film also has several strong characters, including Buzz, Alisha and Izzy Hawthorne, Sox, Darby Steel (an elderly member of the Space Ranger Club with attitude) Mo Morrison (a clumsy Space Ranger Club recruit).

This is a competently made animated film. It seems a bit weaker than some of the other Toy Story films, but it is nonetheless a worthy companion to those movies. This film rates a B.

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