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Angus MacLane Galyn Susman
Greg Peltz
A Toy’s Origin Story Director Angus MacLane and his team talk about the bold choices and classic sci-fi thrills of their new Pixar movie Lightyear. By Ramin Zahed
W
hen Pixar veteran Angus MacLane was a young boy growing up in Portland, Oregon, he used to love cowboys, Spider-Man and cartoons. He also enjoyed wearing a mask to school every day and scaring his friends. As he tells us, “To be honest, I was a bit of a weird kid. I also remember that one day after eating corn on the cob with my father, I saw a movie that changed my life: Star Wars. And after I saw that movie, all I wanted to play and draw was Star Wars. Star Wars was my religion, and it was only the beginning of a string of sci-fi classics that defined my childhood.” MacLane gets to pay homage to many of the sci-fi movies that influenced him in this summer’s much-anticipated Pixar pic Lightyear, which gives audiences the intriguing back story of the popular Toy Story character. “In Toy Story, Andy gets a gift that he loved, it was a Buzz Lightyear the Space Ranger toy, which redefines playtime for Andy,” notes the director. “I always wondered, what movie was Buzz from, you know? Why couldn’t we just make that movie? So that’s what we did. This is the movie that changed Andy’s life — Andy’s Star Wars!”
Lightyear, which is Pixar’s 26th feature, follows the human Buzz as a young astronaut who is marooned in a hostile planet with his commander and crew, and has to find a way across time and space to defeat the familiar enemy Emperor Zurg (who first appeared in Toy Story 2). Showcasing the voice talents of Chris Evans as the title character, along with Keke Palmer, Dale Soules, Taika Waititi, Peter Sohn, Uzo Adubo, James Brolin and Isiah Whitlock Jr., the film finds Buzz also dealing with how the passage of time affects his colleagues and surroundings as he tries to find a way to return to Earth.
A Prisoner of Time “Although I’d been working with the character for the better part of two decades, it was in the development for this film that we truly discovered the unifying character trait of the character that we know and love as Buzz Lightyear,” explains MacLane, who was a storyboard artist on Toy Story 2, directed the shorts Toy Story of Terror and Burn-E and co-directed Finding Dory. “Buzz is a character who is best when he is at odds with his surround-
ings. Here we have a story where he would be traveling rapidly through time, because of his job. And because of that, it would separate him from society and his loved ones. He’s like a Rip Van Winkle trapped in a future he doesn’t recognize, desperately trying to get back to the past to correct the mistakes of his youth — a hero out of his own time.” To help realize his vision for the movie, MacLane teamed up with another studio veteran, producer Galyn Susman (producer on Toy Story 4, assoc. producer on Ratatouille), who had worked with him on several shorts. “I am a tech nerd, but it took me a while to notice,” she says. “I went to college as a physics major hoping to be an astronaut. So when we started working on this film, I was absolutely certain we had to get a research trip to NASA. Our goal was to take our key creatives and expose them to the people, environments, experiences, all the stuff that will impact the design and the language of the film.” Susman says the team was fortunate enough to get first-hand advice from astronauts Tom Marshburn and Kjell Lindgren, who treated them to a comprehensive multi-day
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june|july 22
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