Disney and Pixar’s new ‘Toy Story’ franchise film ‘Lightyear’ is only just coming out and the media is already running stories about the film being “review bombed” over the LGBTQIA representation. The thing is most of the bad reviews are from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and very few reviews even mention the relationship at all.

The narrative has already begun and the movie is only just coming out!

Many news outlets are citing the reviews happening on IMDb. Yes, I do agree there seems to be an abnormal amount of reviews (in general) for a film that just came out in some theaters today. But even reading the reviews the “representation” doesn’t seem to be the biggest reason people aren’t liking it.

Here are a few IMDb reviews:

4/10 – “This movie isn’t terrible. But it’s not good. As a comedy it fails. I laughed only a few times, almost exclusively at the cat. Most of the jokes were crickets in my audience and a bunch made me roll my eyes.

As a sci-fi movie it fails. It gives us the most basic child version of several sci-fi concepts stolen from other movies like Interstellar. And if you think for more than a few seconds, so much of it doesn’t make sense. There was a cool fight scene and a couple of good action moments, but for the most part I found myself not caring about the action….”

4/10 – “….In short just because Pixar is amazing at living breathing characters that does not give them the excuse to make a crappy story throw in some beautiful visuals and good characters

Listen I could definitely see why some might say this film isn’t bad but I’d be hard pressed to say it was good

But listen they got my money and most probay yours too so what do they care?”

1/10 -“One of the lamest and laziest Pixar films to be released in the 2020’s. The film lacked much emotion, energy or just anything to make it special. The kids didn’t enjoy very much and the storyline got a bit complex at times and wasn’t anything noteworthy. Skip it!”

6/10 – “Characters in the early scenes of the movie are well written and the relationships well established. The newly introduced characters (which you spend most of your time with) are not. They all got potential, but they fail to connect with Buzz and therefore fail to connect with the audience. The main antagonist has the same issue. He could’ve been an interesting character, but Pixar went for the easy route instead. This means that we got to see a very generic evil villain, one of which we’ve seen countless times before……

Lightyear isn’t unique. Lightyear isn’t touching. Lightyear isn’t worthy of being called a Pixar production.

Except the cat, the cat was incredible.”

It goes on and on. People really do like the cat though!

Meanwhile on Rotten Tomatoes

Over at Rotten Tomatoes most of the reviews are from the critics and they aren’t liking it all that much either. It’s currently at a 78% and somehow the audience is at 100% with very few reviews and not all of them are 5 stars?  Interesting.

About 20 – 30 minutes later:

When you look at the vast majority of comments they have nothing to do with representation being an issue. 

Some Audience Reviews:

“I was disappointed Tim Allen wasn’t in this one, so that took some thunder from it, right off the bat. Pretty standard Disney/Pixar fair though. Nothing new.” – 2.5/5

“Very entertaining and fast paced. Probably a bit to much but very enjoyable” – 4/5

“One heart plucking scene – a lot of stale dialogue. Nice looking animation, decent action. Plot was meh.“- 2/5

“Won’t rip your heart out like normal pixar. I would have preferred the original voice actor the current one threw off the vibe of Buzz other than that great fun.” – 4.5/5

“I had high hopes based on the trailer. Unfortunately, it was just “eh” for me. Sadly, I haven’t really been wowed by a Pixar movie since Coco.” – 1.5/5

“Lightyear was a fun, exciting movie… that didn’t meet my full expectations. It was fun, yet underwhelming and misfired in some ways, but I enjoyed the movie as a whole.” – 4/5

Here are the critics:

“If Andy loved this movie, then he had some pretty questionable taste.“- Josh Bell, “The Inlander”

“A few notches below the Toy Story franchise but still lots of fun, with the robot cat Sox the scene-stealer.“- Chris Bumbray, “JoBlo’s Movie Network”

“Lightyear is a unique miss in Pixar’s catalog, a film that neither commits to its sci-fi imagination nor tries to find authentic moments for kids.” – Matthew Monagle “The Boston Chronicle.”

“While the movie feels empty and pointless overall, it’s not without its scattered interesting elements.” – Alison Willmore “New York Magazine/Vulture”

“Pixar’s origin story of Buzz Lightyear lacks that “Toy Story” magic.“- Rafer Guzman “Newsday”

Lightyear,” directed by Angus MacLane from a script by Jason Headley, aims to please by pandering, to be good-enough entertainment. As such, it succeeds in a manner more in line with second-tier Disney animation than with top-shelf Pixar.” – A.O. Scott, “New York Times”

“A dead-end wrong turn in the usually boundless Pixar universe.“- Jake Coyle “Associated Press”

While it’s way too early to tell what audiences will actually think, the initial narrative being given by some media around representation being the cause of the initial lackluster reviews is manipulation at it’s finest.  That does not seem to be the case for the majority of reviews out there and surely not for the film reviewers who are being harder on it that anyone so far.

Maybe it just doesn’t work and Disney should have stuck to traditional ‘Toy Story.’ I would strongly recommend they stay far away from the “people are bigots” narrative.