The best known line of dialogue from Toy Story – the best known line from any Pixar film, in fact – is Buzz Lightyear’s gloriously nonsensical catchphrase, “To infinity – and beyond!” It’s hardly surprising, then, that he says it once every 15 minutes in Lightyear, the new Pixar cartoon which is, supposedly, the sci-fi blockbuster which prompted Andy’s mother to buy him a Buzz action figure back in 1995. What is surprising is that Buzz’s exploits in the film are the exact opposite of what that catchphrase implies. He doesn’t hurtle away to the edge of the universe, let alone beyond it. He spends most of the cartoon stranded on one desolate desert planet, like Matt Damon in The Martian, only with fewer laughs.
The Toy Story series is stranded in a similar sort of way. One of the most touching aspects of the other films is that they show time slipping past. Andy grows up, leaves home, and puts away childish things, whereupon any viewer who’s ever had a child or been a child bursts into tears. Lightyear scraps all of that poignancy and profundity. By retreating to when Andy was six years old, it lets us forget that, by now, he’d probably have kids of his own. But it isn’t just the Toy Story team that’s pressing the rewind button. Everywhere you look, Hollywood’s biggest science-fiction, fantasy and action franchises have stopped exploring uncharted territory, and put themselves into reverse gear.
