Lightyear follows a familiar Pixar theme — and that’s its biggest problem

polygon.com:

For the last seven years, one of the most popular critical analyses of Pixar Animation Studios movies has come from a Tumblr meme. Granted, it’s an insightful meme. The idea that Pixar movies all boil down to “What if [random object] had feelings?” does hold water, and given how much the studio built its name on the idea of evoking profound, powerful adult emotions in animated movies, it’s an understandable lens for viewing Pixar work.

But the studio’s new science fiction movie Lightyear suggests another way of looking at Pixar that’s a little less simple, but just as relevant. Arguably, Pixar’s strongest movies are about people (or toys, rats, robots, anthropomorphized emotions, etc.) figuring out how to accept who they are and how to live with each other. Lightyear forges new ground for Pixar with an ambitious story built around a new alien world and a new human society, focusing on how one man deals with his own shortcomings and losses over the course of more than half a century of lost time. But at heart, it links back to that core Pixar concept about opening up to other people as a first step toward finding a comfortable place in the world. That should be a resonant theme — certainly past Pixar movies, from Inside Out to Up to Coco to the original Toy Story, have drawn powerful narratives from the same message. But Lightyear takes such a disjointed, surface-level approach to the idea that it doesn’t land as powerfully as it should.

Lightyear has a slightly complicated place in Pixar’s franchise thinking. It’s meant to be a fictional artifact from the Toy Story world: the favorite sci-fi movie of Toy Story’s central human character, Andy. Toy Story’s toy version of Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen) is a piece of