Lightyear exemplifies one of Pixar’s recent running themes: failure

polygon.com:

Disney and Pixar’s big summer movie Lightyear arrived on the Disney Plus streaming service after grossing around $120 million at the domestic box office. This is, at the moment, the 10th biggest North American gross of 2022, representing more money than a number of hits including The Bad Guys, The Lost City, Scream, and The Black Phone. It is also, by Disney and Pixar’s standards, a failure.

In retrospect, it doesn’t make much sense to compare Lightyear’s finances to the Toy Story series that spawned it. Lightyear positions itself as the “real” movie that made Andy, the main human character in the first three Toy Story movies, obsessed with Buzz Lightyear. But the whole Toy Story deal is predicated on the idea that toys’ owners could imbue them with a rich, imaginative, deeply human inner life far beyond their plastic origins, all of which rendersLightyear’s humanization of Buzz somewhere between redundant and obsolete. Its decent grosses also look like a minimum baseline for its studio. Only Onward, released mere days before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down movie theaters nationwide, attracted fewer people to a wide theatrical release of a Pixar movie. (Yes, The Good Dinosaur was marginally more popular than Lightyear.)

At the same time, Lightyear does have an unusual, compelling element: It preemptively addresses its own failure through its storyline. The movie is very much about learning to accept the disappointment and other consequences of making a mistake, rather than heroically fixing or undoing the error.

Lightyear’s focus on failure is a theme it has in common with a number of Pixar movies from the past decade. During this time, the studio has remained a box office powerhouse; half of its biggest-ever hits have