Lightyear Movie Director Reveals How LEGO Bricks Influenced its Making

To anyone directly involved in the filmmaking process, “easy” might not exactly be the word they’d use to describe the entire process. For any movie to come out great, it must naturally pass through many complex processes.

It would be best if you tried to imagine how much effort making an animated film would take. However, animated films stand on a whole other level as a somewhat distinct creative piece that requires the creation of different ideas and concepts before even a complete scene is produced. 

Unlike the initial days when Disney would make animations by shooting live-action scenes, so animators could have a picture of how hand-drawn characters would move, we have it quite different today. Now, animated characters are drawn and moulded from clay, so digital animators can grasp the full picture of the character.

However, Angus MacLane – the director of the Lightyear animated movie (and a huge LEGO fan, we must add), took a different turn and gave a solid picture of his ideas using LEGO bricks.

The Lightyear character was birthed in Pixar’s first Toy Story film, directed by Angus MacLane. We see from the Toy Story movies how the character has evolved to fit into his owner’s world, and now, there is the Lightyear film which tells his very own story. 

Angus MacLane is a known LEGO fan, so much so that he designed the Wall-E LEGO Ideas model. His love for LEGO can be seen in his creative technique in creating Lightyear. 

Rather than express his ideas for the spacecraft and vehicles used by Star Command by sketching them out in the traditional way, he crafted them using LEGO techniques. Digital animators then used the models he built to create several concepts seen in the Lightyear film.

His technique was summarily covered in the Beyond Lightyear documentary, which is available on Disney+

The interesting part is how the Lightyear director intentionally created one of the ships Buzz flew with a yellow slated canopy, just so the LEGO set that would be released based on the Lightyear theme would also feature the same yellow slated canopy.

To summarize it all, the Lightyear movie, which is based on a toy from another movie, was made using toys, and now we have toys based on that movie, easy enough!

You can now grab the LEGO Disney Lightyear sets as the exciting new Lightyear film features in cinemas on the 17th of June.