There’s a lot riding on the success of“Lightyear”for Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios. But the film’s director, Angus MacLane, isn’t worried at all.

The film marks the Emeryville studio’s first theatrical release in more than two years, after its last three movies (“Soul,”“Luca”and“Turning Red”) went straight to streaming because of the pandemic. It is also the origin tale of one of the most beloved characters in the studio’s biggest franchise.

No big deal, right?

“Well, it’s not up to me. So that’s what’s so great about it. The movie’s done,” said the unflappable MacLane during a recent video chat with The Chronicle. “Our PR team could not be more capable. My job was to build the mechanism of the movie. I would feel disingenuous or feel nervous about it if we had something to hide, product-wise.”

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“Lightyear,” of course, chronicles the history behind Buzz Lightyear, one of the toys in the “Toy Story” franchise. The idea is that Andy, the kid in the original“Toy Story” (1995),got the action figure because he loved the movie featuring Buzz. “Lightyear,” which opens wide on Friday, June 17, is that movie.

“I would have felt more pressure if it was a ‘Toy Story’ film,” MacLane said. “But it’s so separate, and I feel like I have such a unique perspective on the character having been with it so long. Because it’s not a sequel, I think it was more of an interpretation of the character in a new way that I felt was to the core truth of the character.”

Tim Allen is, and shall always be, Buzz Lightyear the toy from TOY STORY.

Patrick Warburton is, and shall always be, Buzz Lightyear from BUZZ LIGHTYEAR OF STAR COMMAND.

Chris Evans is, and shall always be, Buzz Lightyear from#Lightyear.

— Angus MacLane (@AngusMacLane)June 15, 2022

Although it is MacLane’s first film as solo director, he and producer Galyn Susman are Pixar lifers.MacLane, who lives in Berkeley with his wife, Tashana Landray— a former department manager at Pixar — and their two children, came to Pixar in 1997. Susman arrived in 1990. Each has worked on multiple “Toy Story” movies; one of MacLane’s tasks was animating the Ken doll in“Toy Story 3.”

So MacLane and Susman know the material. Early on they made a crucial decision: to replace Tim Allen, the voice of Buzz in the “Toy Story” movies, withChris Evans.The idea behind that decision was that Allen played the voice of the toy, while Evans is the voice of the actual guy, bringing a “Captain America” vibe to the swashbuckling character.

“We needed to reinvent him,” MacLane said. “We needed to have him have gravitas yet be super funny, but not betoogoofy and be able to carry the technical challenges. Chris is so technically gifted. If you needed him to do a certain thing, he could do it. And then he could build on that. We wanted more of a Harrison Ford than a William Shatner.”

Evans, who rarely voices characters in animated films, told The Chronicle in a separate phone interview that working with MacLane was “wonderful,” and said he leaned heavily on the director because he was “alone in a booth, and you don’t have visuals, and you don’t quite have an understanding of the circumstance or the stakes or the energy of the scenes.”

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“One of the best things about most of those directors at Pixar, they’re sneaky actors,” Evans continued. “They’re actually really good performers. They really know how to convey emotions. I mean, even the animators. So you trust that they know what they’re doing. And if they say, ‘Jump,’ you just say, ‘How high?’ and you just try to give them as many options as possible.”

The film also features the voices of Keke Palmer, Uzo Aduba,Taika Waititi,Peter Sohn, James Brolin and Bill Hader.

Susman, who joined MacLane on the video chat, said it has been a pleasure to watch MacLane grow creatively during his time at Pixar. He previously co-directed“Finding Dory”with Andrew Stanton, and Susman said his vision for “Lightyear” was “so big and so complex and more than we could ever do” that it led to several brainstorming sessions with Pixar’s top supervisors to figure out how best to deliver his vision.

“Angus is a unique director in that he both knows exactly what he wants, but he’s also very open to new ideas and to feedback,” Susman said. “They would present ideas for how they could give him what he wanted, but maybe in a more affordable way. Even if it wasn’t what was very specifically in his head, he was able to say, ‘OK, got it. That we can afford. … And this looks really cool. Let’s do that and this and that and grow on it.’ So that kind of flexibility I find very unique, and that’s something that I think he’s really learned over the course of his time at Pixar.”

MacLane smiled and said, “I just wanted it to be cool.”

然后导演提供了一个意想不到的inspiration for the film: “The Blues Brothers,” the 1980 action comedy starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. A heist sequence early in the film, in which Buzz steals a spaceship, harked back to MacLane’s childhood in Portland, Ore., where his father introduced him to movies.

“For whatever reason, the No. 1 thing that gets my father laughing is authority figures being embarrassed,” MacLane said. “Watching ‘The Blues Brothers’ with my father is one of the greatest experiences in my life, because by the time it gets to the 90-car pileup, he can’t stop laughing, and then more cars keep coming. So he has to keep gasping for air.

“My love of cinema was completely fostered by his willingness to take me to movies, even when the (Motion Picture Association of America) would say it was inappropriate for a person of that age. So for me, I’m so excited to see (“Lightyear”) with my dad and have him experience an authority figure realizing a subordinate is being insubordinate.”

“Lightyear”(PG) opens in theaters on Friday, June 17.