Lightyear is an animated film about the adventures of one of the main characters of Toy Story, recently released on screens. The film directors made a space savior named Buzz Lightyear as non-toy as possible and played all the main cliches of fantastic works in the story about him at once.
Cartoon about a space hero
How to assemble in one plot brave space marines, evil alien bugs, robots good and robots bad, scientists launching a spaceship with superluminal speed and time travel with a change in the course of history so that it does not make negative impressions? In the new animated film, Lightyear showed Pixar and Disney studios that this is not only possible, but also allows them to create a really interesting story about space adventures.
What to expect from the film, the creators hint by placing a disclaimer at the very beginning: “in 1994, a boy named Andy received a toy in the form of the hero of his favorite science fiction film. What a movie”. This inscription refers to the “Toy Story” and one of its main characters Buzz Lightyear, but at the same time makes it clear that it will not be entirely about it.
The heroes of the cult Pixar film series are toys and their characters and conflicts caused by this fact. In “Lightyear” we meet Baz, if he really was the hero of a big-budget Hollywood science fiction movie — a brave space ranger.
Conventionality and seriousness
The adventures in the film are both serious and rather conventional. Of course, it can be figured out that a planet at a distance of 4.2 million light-years should be somewhere outside the Milky Way, on the outskirts of the Local Group. One can even conclude that it is somewhere in the group of galaxies a Pump-Sextant.
You can try to analyze the trajectory of Buzz’s flight around the star to achieve a relativistic speed. This maneuver is called a “gravitational sling” and is really used to accelerate spaceships.
All this is not important, but from the very beginning the viewer is hinted at the “cinematic” nature of everything that is happening, and it is not worth waiting for scientific reliability here. But at the same time, the problems in the film are quite serious.
Will a group of people who crashed survive in a world full of monsters and will they be able to keep advanced technology. The film convincingly shows that yes. How the landing on the newly discovered planet should be organized so that it is safe and rational. This question is not answered in the Lightyear, but they give a large amount of material for thinking.
Finally, they show in sufficient detail here that the path to space travel can be difficult. Decades of experiments that end in failure all the time can make many give up. But sooner or later a solution will be found.
Where will Buzz Lightyear look for adventures?
The authors stuffed into the film not only all possible fantastic cliches, but also all the main locations for space adventures. All of them are allocated little screen time, but it is enough to understand each of them. Here you can admire a high-tech city fenced with a laser screen, an alien forest, a cave full of enemy arthropods, an abandoned mining enterprise and a lava field. And of course, there will be an alien spaceship full of enemy robots and flights in space.
Buzz Lightyear: History of mistakes
The whole story is built on mistakes, as we always do in our lives. A stamped movie hero in a critical situation does not make mistakes and saves everyone. But we know that this does not happen in life. And in “Lightyear” this is the main way of plotting.
Buzz Lightyear is constantly put in situations that we have seen a hundred times in Hollywood action movies. Immediately there is a suspicion that he will now grab the blaster that fell so conveniently and save everyone. And at this moment we are shown how the hero fails to do it. He’s wrong.
Even more, the theme of what goes wrong as intended is the main engine of the plot in the film. At the very beginning, Lightyear makes a mistake and then goes to fix it with incredible stubbornness. What will come of it, you can find out only in the final.
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