Lightyear’s director set out to make adult sci-fi, not another animated movie about kids

polygon.com:

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Pixar’s newest film, Lightyear, is not about “the real Buzz Lightyear,” in the sense of an actual human astronaut who inspired the beloved toy that co-stars in the Toy Story movies. Within the Pixar fiction, Lightyear is a science fiction feature film that came out in the Toy Story world, years before the events of the first Toy Story. The Toy Story movies’ original human protagonist, Andy, might have caught it on VHS or as a TV rerun. In-universe, Lightyear the sci-fi epic is the reason Andy’s world has a Buzz Lightyear animated television series, video game, and line of toys.

But while Lightyear is technically a movie made to exist within the Toy Story universe, the filmmakers didn’t want to lean too hard on any connections to the original Pixar feature.

“I don’t think we look at it as paying tribute, as much as giving us a little bit of grounding, something very specific to launch off of and then tell our own story,” says producer Galyn Susman.

Lightyear’s tone is starkly different from the tone of the Toy Story saga. One thing director Angus McLane wanted to capture in his film was the passage of time. To him, the toy Buzz Lightyear always feels most like a character when he’s at odds with his surroundings, whether he’s thinking he’s a real space hero among a cast of kids’ toys, or he’s being reset into Spanish mode. But the real driver for the movie’s theme came from McLane’s personal experiences working at Pixar.

“It was based around the idea of the way we make movies here. They’re really in four- or five-year chunks,” McLane says. “So that was in the idea of — what would it be like if you felt like you were jumping through time? It really felt like the way we feel when