If you’ve seen Pixar’s Lightyear, I’m willing to bet you can’t get enough Sox.
In the Toy Story spinoff/prequel/in-universe movie, Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Chris Evans) is on a mission with a crew of more than 1,000 individuals sent to explore a potentially resource-rich planet. When the time comes to head back to Earth, Buzz makes a decision that leaves the entire group stranded on a rather unpleasant planet. Buried in guilt, Buzz becomes determined to do whatever it takes to get them all home, even if it means letting life pass him by in the process. However, hope and emotional support come in the form of an unexpected companion, a robot cat named Sox voiced by Peter Sohn.
With Lightyear now playing in theaters nationwide, I got the chance to sit down with director Angus MacLane and producer Galyn Susman and absolutely had to get every single detail on the creation of Sox, a character I truly believe is one of the best characters ever created by Pixar. (And they’ve delivered quite a few ingenious things over the years!)
MacLane began by highlighting Coco screenwriter Matthew Aldrich’s early involvement in Lightyear and why they once considered making Sox a monkey rather than a cat:
“The beginning of developing the movie, I was working with Matt Aldrich, who is our first writer who left the project amicably. He had other things to do. He and I were thinking about a cute thing. We needed a cute thing for the movie, and we did a research into what cute things were good and what cute things were bad, and the cute thing was something that was loyal to our hero and was not snarky and was funny, but not in a sarcastic or cynical way. And looking at R2-D2 and his limited movement was always appealing to us. So we had first thought a monkey because of the space program. There would be this monkey sent into space and that would be that kind of thing. Like a helper monkey. But it wasn’t quite as funny as cat movement. Robotic cat movement was funnier. We always thought of like, ‘Oh, a cat on a computer is funny so if we can get cat on a computer we’ll do that,’ and then so combining a lot of the kind of animatronic sensibilities with this kind of helper cat instead of a helper monkey became Sox.”
Sox isn’t the only brilliant element of Lightyear Aldrich helped develop. MacLane revealed they also came up with the idea for the meat sandwiches together:
“There were two big things that Matt had done. That and the sandwiches was a riff that he and I did. So he and I were both the cat and the sandwiches.”
MacLane went on to explain how Sox’s tactics for motivating Buzz changed throughout the filmmaking process:
“He was always meant to be this thing where Buzz was gonna be isolated from society. We had that first and so the cat was gonna be his one constant through time, but there used to be this whole thing where he would [be] like, ‘Hey, you wanna watch TV? Or you wanna go to party?’ He kept trying to throw him things, get him to socialize.”
MacLane also shared a joke cut from the movie that Sox was meant to deliver:
“There was this great Bed, Bath and Beyond joke we had to cut, which is an amazing sentence to say is. Buzz has been gone so long that there’s like a mountain of Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons behind his door and then the cat would say, ‘You know, they have 30% off. Even if they’re expired they’ll still take them.’ I was sad to lose that joke.”
Yes, Sox is a fantastic addition to Lightyear and the Toy Story series in general, but given the fact that Lightyear is technically the in-world movie that inspired Andy to want a Buzz Lightyear toy in 1995’s Toy Story, one’s got to wonder, what about Sox? Sox had to be a hugely popular character in Andy’s reality, so were the filmmakers ever concerned that viewers might wonder why the Toy Story films never featured a toy version of Sox as well? “No, because the Buzz toy is from, imagine like a cartoon and I don’t know if Sox is in that cartoon.” MacLane went on to admit:
“Originally, when we first pitched Sox to Andrew [Stanton], he was like, ‘But there was no cat. We didn’t have a cat. Andy, he didn’t have a cat in Toy Story.’ We had to [be] like, ‘Yeah, but it could be great.’ Also, who knows? Andy has the entire line of toys?”
Perhaps Andy doesn't own the entire line of Lightyear toys and, I'm just riffing here, but that feels like a perfectly good excuse to make a Toy Story 1.5 focusing on another kid in Andy's reality who has a Sox toy instead of a Buzz Lightyear toy.
Another thing one might wonder given the in-world nature of Lightyear is, does this mean that Pixar made the movie within Andy’s world? Does Pixar exist within Pixar films? “We found out today that yes, it does.” MacLane continued, “It says Pixar in the title of our movie. That means Pixar exists in Andy’s world.”
Not only that, but MacLane also noted that someone told him that because the filmmaker names are in the credits, technically, everyone who worked on Lightyear is in Andy’s reality now. “We’re characters in the movie. So now, if you think about it, now we’re like Disney characters that made the movie in-universe.”
Looking for more on the making of Lightyear? You can find just that straight from MacLane and Susman in our full conversation in the video interview at the top of this article!