After its June release marked the first time since the start of the pandemic that a Pixar animated 

feature had opened in movie theaters, “Lightyear” is now available to stream at home, on Disney Plus. 

“Lightyear,” viewers are told at the beginning, is supposedly the film that inspired the Buzz Lightyear 

saga, the film also has unexpected connections to Portland. Angus MacLane, who directed “Lightyear,” 

grew up in the Portland area, graduating from Beaverton High School in 1993. In a June interview with 

The Oregonian/OregonLive, MacLane said some of the inspiration for the “Lightyear” storyline grew out 

of MacLane’s trips back home to Portland after he had moved to California. As MacLane said, when 

he was living in California and working on Pixar films, every few years, he would visit Portland, and find 

the city “didn’t feel quite the same.” MacLane noticed changes, though people in Portland often didn’t.

“And then I would go home, and Portland didn’t feel quite the same,” he says. People he had known 

grew older, and other little things changed, which he noticed, even if people in Portland didn’t.

In “Lightyear,” the Space Ranger (voiced by Chris Evans) makes a fateful mistake, and tries to make 

amends by going on test flights that he hopes will help him complete his mission. However, while the

flights don’t seem to last very long for Buzz, for those behind, test flights take years to accomplish.

Each time Buzz returns to planet T’Kani Prime, friends have grown older and are settled into hostile planet.