Lightyear<\/a> \u2013 Pixar\u2019s new Toy Story spin-off movie \u2013 some text flashes up on screen informing us that the film we\u2019re about to watch had been Andy\u2019s personal favourite back in 1995, the very one that had encouraged him to buy his beloved Buzz Lightyear toy all those years ago.<\/p>\nWhile this is unquestionably a more coherent introduction to the film than star Chris Evans\u2019 much-mocked statement when it was initially announced \u2013 \u201cThis isn\u2019t Buzz Lightyear the toy. This is the origin story of the human Buzz Lightyear that the toy is based on\u201d \u2013 it also means the film is setting itself rather an ambitious target: for it to really be considered a success on its own terms, Lightyear has to convincingly seem like it could be the very favourite film of at least a portion of its young target audience.<\/p>\n
To truly answer whether it succeeds on those grounds you\u2019d probably be better off asking a group of pre-teens, but my personal opinion is that it falls just short. It\u2019s a fun and often amusing time at the movies no doubt, with some well-executed set pieces and consistently beautiful visuals \u2013\u00a0 but it doesn\u2019t quite have the invention or emotional heft of some of Pixar\u2019s better efforts, and winds up feeling relatively throwaway as a result.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t help that the story itself is a little too convoluted for its own good. There are several false starts before we\u2019re eventually launched into the main thrust of the action, which sees Buzz team up with a ragtag bunch of characters \u2013 including the granddaughter of his former colleague and an escaped convict whose criminal past is kept deliberately ambiguous \u2013 as they hatch a plan to finally escape a planet he\u2019d crash-landed on several years ago.<\/p>\n