While the movie feels empty and pointless overall, it’s not without its scattered interesting elements. Pixar is good at this, even when they’re putting out work that feels as off-puttingly calculated and visually underwhelming as Lightyear - which is “live action” in the sense that steers away from more fluid and figurative animation in favor of more grounded character design and movement. Voiced by The Good Dinosaur director Peter Sohn, Sox expresses the mechanical through the animal, chanting “meowmeowmeow” while making calculations and keeping a USB drive in the tip of his tail.

The thing about Sox is that he’s endearing as fuck, though, as though Baymax were shaped like an adorable pet instead of a marshmallow. Now they’ve backfilled this cycle by making their own cynical version of the sci-fi movie that inspired some of that consumer detritus, complete with a new highly collectible character in the sidekick Sox, a talking robotic cat. Pixar made a beloved saga about the meaning that mass-produced plastic and even artful collections of garbage can have when they are the focus of a child’s love and imagination. Movies and merch have a symbiotic relationship, with retail sales helping justify outrageous budgets, and studios mining toy lines for ideas - see the Transformers, the G.I. But Lightyear isn’t actually that hard to understand. This premise has acquired an aura of franchise incomprehensibility, thanks in large part to an explanatory tweet from voice star Chris Evans that immediately went viral, as well as director Angus MacLane’s more recent insistence that the movie, though animated, is “live-action” within the Toy Story universe. The new Pixar movie Lightyear is meant to be the blockbuster that spawned the Buzz Lightyear action figure Andy receives as a birthday present at the start of the original Toy Story.

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