The following contains spoilers for Lightyear, now streaming on Disney+.
Though some fans may have likely been excited about it, it seems that the world at large is rather disinterested in Pixar's latest film, Lightyear. With fairly tepid reviews and a total failure at the box office, the movie has failed to take the character to infinity and beyond. Part of this may be the lack of real connection to the broader Toy Story franchise, despite the film's hackneyed attempt to make said connection.
According to a pre-movie scroll beforehand, Lightyear is the film that Andy watched before the events of the first Toy Story, thus inspiring him to want a Buzz Lightyear toy. Given the actual movie itself, this feels incredibly unlikely and reeks of a final hail Mary to pander to an audience that just wasn't there for the film. Here's how the movie fails to pull off perhaps its most important mission: reach Toy Story fans.
Lightyear Doesn't Feel Like a '90s Kids Movie
The original Toy Story movie came out in 1995, showing how the recently purchased Buzz Lightyear toy ingratiates himself with the rest of Andy's amusements. Still, there's no way that Lightyear is the film he saw beforehand, as it simply doesn't feel like it belongs in the era. Disney dominated animated kids' movies in the 1990s, setting the general tone for children's cinema along with other studios. Even among the more serious flicks of the '90s, Lightyear would completely stand out. It's simply too bold-faced, with not enough of the humor that kids back then would have liked. This has actually been one of its biggest criticisms, as Lightyear is too serious for kids but too kiddy for adults.
Making the movie feel like a creative throwback would have actually worked, as it might have brought in the audiences who were kids themselves when Toy Story first came out. This would have created a trinity of nostalgia at the time of its release, with both Jurassic World Dominion and Top Gun: Maverick doing similar things. Not only would parents be able to take their kids to see something based on a character from their own childhood, but by imitating the popular Disney musicals of the time period, it would even feel the same. That didn't happen, but it's not the only thing that keeps the film from seeming like something that Andy would have liked.
Buzz Lightyear Isn't a Bombastic Hero In Lightyear
Perhaps the biggest issue with the film, especially for fans, is that Buzz isn't particularly heroic. In fact, he's something of a sad sap who's almost completely ineffectual, to the point where the villain of the movie is literally him. On top of that, there's none of the over-the-top, cartoony nature of Buzz's character from the Toy Story films in Lightyear. That could almost be excused given that this is supposed to be the "real" guy, but that falls apart given that everything in the film is just a darker version of his backstory in the main movies. It doesn't feel like a "real" astronaut movie, thus making these changes even more egregious.
There's certainly nothing that a little boy would latch onto and see as particularly cool, especially given the other films that came out in that area. For instance, the other Disney movies are shown as existing in the world of Toy Story, namely The Lion King. Andy would've gushed over that film "lightyears" before this one, and suggesting that Lightyear is what made him want a Buzz toy feels like a tacked-on way to validate the movie. If anything, the film comes off as a cliché live-action reboot of a property, using only the name and perhaps the look while completely losing the heart. Sadly, that meant that Lightyear also lost the dollars of a supposedly built-in fanbase, proving that it didn't have a friend in them.
To see the movie Andy supposedly saw, Lightyear is now streaming on Disney+.