How Pixar ‘heroed up’ Buzz Lightyear’s spacesuit

Pixar’s Lightyear isn’t another installment in the Toy Story movie series; it’s meant as a gritty science fiction adventure. The movie follows Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Chris Evans) — the sci-fi movie character, not the toy — as he accidentally maroons himself and a whole ship of rangers on a barren planet. Buzz attempts to save the ship by attempting to escape from the barren planet. He then embarks on several space expeditions. Pixar’s creative team went to NASA to create their space adventure. The team visited NASA to talk with astronauts, and they took many photos of all the gadgets used in space exploration.

Fran Kalal, Simulator and Tailoring Supervisor LightyearSo, he began studying spacesuits from real world. These spacesuits are essential parts of every space mission. Kalal and her team not only designed the intricate spacesuits for the movie’s setting, but also made sure that they worked with the physics.

Image: Pixar

“You’ve got to get them right for the story, because a spacesuit is designed to be a mini spaceship if anything goes wrong,” Kalal tells Polygon. “There’s tons of components to it. There’s life support, there’s lots of structure underneath that we don’t even get to see. Pixar’s spacesuits are complex and unique. It was great to be able to explore all the details and see how everything worked together. […] It was so exciting to get more and more spacesuits and show how they would evolve over time, with the touchpoint of working our way back to the Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger costume that we all know and love.”

Creating those successive iterations of the suit as Buzz’s mission evolves was part of the challenge. This is where Kalal’s team looked at the history of space exploration — but also decided to go for something a little more awesome, and a little less accurate to real life.

“In the early days of human space exploration, often when you look at spacesuits, they look a bit like a onesie, because they are,” Kalal laughs. Even if it was accurate, a onesie look just wouldn’t do for a hero like Buzz Lightyear. “One of the things we did early on is like, Well, let’s try a belt on Buzz in his spacesuit. Let’s see how that looks.It was a great help to him. Another benefit was that it allowed us to move towards the Space Ranger costumes. We were all like: OK, great. We have a touchpoint for how we’re going to get to that Space Ranger costume. It makes him look so much more heroic to have that belt on.”

LightyearIn theaters June 17