Lightyear: How Michael Giacchino Found the Sci-Fi Sound for a Toy Story
Lightyear is a whole new level of meta, bringing the Pixar movie to theaters means bringing to our world the movie which inspired the Buzz Lightyear toy in the world of Toy Story. It's a sci-fi tale with Chris Evans voicing the titular Space Ranger as he tries to relentlessly to complete his mission as life passes him by. Of course, this means Pixar emotion is packed into the film, as well. For Michael Giacchino, it was a prime opportunity to dive into a brand new sound for the character known well from the Toy Story movies and he didn't pull as much from those four films as one might have thought and give credits to the musicians behind the sound.
"I just remembered what it was like to be 12 years old, going to the movie theater and watching all the movies I watched growing up as a kid," Giacchino told ComicBook.com. "I mean, it was kind of as simple as that, just like 'Let's dig deep into the movies we grew up with that we loved,' and 'Let's just pull all that inspiration and throw it onto the screen for this movie.; And that's honestly what it was. It was really just this incredible, beautiful sort of, uh, homage. And thank you to all the films I grew up with."
While Toy Story has its own beloved musical score thanks to the work of Randy Newman, Giacchino wanted to build his own sounds for Lightyear as this movie's origin called for existing in a different cinematic world, technically. "This was its own separate thing," Giacchino said. "While I absolutely love every single note of music, Randy Newman has ever written in his life, this was an area where it was just like, 'Alright, we're gonna go do this instead,' because this is completely out of bounds from what we know from the normal Toy Story world that we're used to seeing and living in."
Fittingly, Giacchino is about to seeing and living in another new world. The legendary composer who has delivered the sounds for titles such as The Batman, LOST, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Ratatouille, is currently parked in the director's chair of Marvel's Werewolf by Night. Werewolf by Night is set to be a Halloween special on Disney+ and will be the biggest project Giacchino has taken on as a director.
Giacchino is no stranger to being credited on these massive films as he oversees orchestras to drum up the sounds of iconic characters and their films. However, Lightyear credited that orchestra, as well. It's an uncommon move which Giacchino was excited to see included in Pixar's latest title. "I had heard later on in the process that we were gonna do that, I was very happy about that," he said. "It's only been done a few times and Pixar is starting to make a more of a regular practice of it, which I'm very thankful for because of the people that work on these films, the musicians that play the music that I write, they have devoted their entire life to becoming the type of musician that you can throw any music in front of, and they can play it for you like that, you know, and that's an incredible discipline. That's really hard. When you think of, of everyone on the film that gets their name on the film, you know, the musicians are the ones who usually have spent the most time in their life getting as good as they can in order to do what they do for a movie and sound has such a huge impact on a film. So, to see their names up there made me very, very, very happy."
Did you see Lightyear on its opening weekend? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Twitter. ComicBook.com's full interview with Giacchino can be seen in the video above! Lightyear is now playing in theaters.
