The following post contains SPOILERS for Lightyear. If you can figure out a way to explain the ending of a movie without spoiling it, please let us know. We would love to hear it.
Just because Lightyear is a Pixar movie, doesn’t mean it’s exclusively a movie for kids. (Let’s be honest: A lot of Pixar movies are as much or more for adults than for children.) In fact, Lightyear centers around a surprisingly serious and realistic depiction of time travel and time dilation, which happens each time the film’s Buzz Lightyear tests out his spaceship’s engine in an attempt to get himself and his crew home from a mission gone awry.
The precise nature of time travel in Lightyear, along with the film’s ending, and the identity of “Evil Emperor Zurg” is the subject of our latest video. We go through the film’s story and how it uses the relative nature of time to tell a surprisingly moving story about aging and mortality. (We also explain time travel with a VHS copy of Shrek because, well, it’s us.) Watch and learn below:
If you liked that video on understanding time travel and the ending of Lightyear, check out more of our videos below, including our favorite Pixar Easter eggs, the differences between Pixar and Disney villains, and the one scene in Finding Nemo that is the single most important thing the studio has ever done. Plus, there’s tons more videos over at ScreenCrush’s YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe to catch all our future episodes. Lightyear is now streaming on Disney+.
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