How Pixar and Disney groom through cartoon content.
Lightyear proves that the folks at Pixar and Disney are past masters at audience manipulation, now known as “grooming.” This isn’t only because of Lightyear’s already infamous lesbian kiss, gratuitous in a family-entertainment animated film (the kiss scene is banned in Saudi Arabia and passed as a matter of corporate pride in the U.S.). Pixar has been grooming audiences for decades. Lightyear is Pixar’s 26th feature release, the latest in the digital-technology company’s command of the animation field — so much so that Pixar is wrongly considered the gold standard.
Fact is, Pixar’s standard is itself standard. Lightyear is derived from the Toy Story franchise that brings to life the action figures owned by little boy Andy, and it extends that ultimate marketing concept into a competing genre. Sold as the origin story of Andy’s Buzz Lightyear toy, Lightyear gives the Buzz Lightyear futuristic astronaut-space-ranger doll his own spin-off. The story of Buzz’s early years, his comradeship with Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), then a time-bending space adventure with a crew that includes Alisha’s grandchild, still follows the standard Pixar formula of “Let’s get everybody home.”
This kind of filmmaking is like hybrid gardening. The children’s cartoon and the adolescent action film are combined to create what is ultimately the same product. Lightyear takes us deep into the Toy Story rabbit hole — or is it “multiverse”? Once we consent to the idea of watching a movie that generated the purchase of tie-in products, then accept that it has the exact same style as the Pixar films that originated it, we enter the mad redundancy of accepting as our own what is supposed to be the imagination of cartoon child Andy.
In other words, there’s nothing new in Lightyear. It is the latest Hollywood mind control. Thoroughly groomed consumers must pretend that Pixar’s latest instance of merchandizing is somehow akin to art. Robert Zemeckis explored this edge-of-schizophrenia multiverse and cultural idea in Welcome to Marwen, a dramatic, partially digitally animated examination of a grown man’s clinical autism. It was marketed as “augmented reality,” but Lightyear has been greeted as a Pixar breakthrough.
Director Angus MacLane follows orders like a toy soldier, repeating Toy Story’s fatuous tone in the way Buzz (now voiced by Chris Evans) accentuates the goofy hollow heroism. If that seems cynical, recall that Evans replaced Tim Allen after Disney progressives’ political purge. It’s part of the Pixar–Disney agenda to add identity politics to the Toy Story franchise, as if the original cast of assorted Toys “R” Us, nursery-rhyme figures were not diverse enough.
Pixar robs Millennial audiences of the capacity to discern behavioral and personality details that distinguished Buzz from cowboy Woody. This challenges Buzz’s white-male-astronaut prototype, specifically with Alisha and her lesbian kiss, then the other characters — granddaughter Izzy (Keke Palmer), Darby (Dale Soules), Mo (Taika Waititi), plus robot feline SOX (Peter Sohn) in the inscrutable-Asian role.
Disney-Pixar grooms viewers toward identity politics through diversity casting, which shouldn’t be necessary, especially since Lightyear imitates the action-film genre that has always been integrated and multiracial. Overriding that tradition is the final insult, along with MacLane’s brazen visual references to past cartoons and sci-fi movies — A.I., The Iron Giant, Star Trek, Wall-E, even Guardians of the Galaxy. None of it enlightens our emotional connection to pop culture, it’s just incessant marketing and the cheapest sentimentality since Rin Tin Tin.
