Tim Allen 'couldn't even get through the last scene' of emotional 'Toy Story 4'
Few things can reduce grown adults to tears as reliably as a Pixar movie — and according to star Tim Allen, Toy Story 4 will be even more of a tearjerker than its predecessors. In an interview with The Talk earlier this week, the man who voices Buzz Lightyear described the upcoming film as “so emotional” that he “couldn’t even get through the last scene.”
“I gotta resist getting emotional because I don’t wanna give it away, but this is an incredibly great story,” Allen told co-host Sarah Gilbert. (See the clip above.)
Explaining that he’d completed only the first of many recording sessions, Allen said he was “startled” by the script, which he described as “so emotional, it’s so funny — it’s so big, the idea of what they’ve come up with.” Careful not to reveal any plot details, Allen said that he was so choked up while recording that he “couldn’t even get through the last scene.”
Interestingly, Allen also compared Toy Story 4 to Avengers: Infinity War. It sounds like he was speaking in terms of the story structure (“It was a lot of vignettes that all made sense”), but given the rest of his comments, fans will no doubt be wondering if Buzz is taking his final voyage into the stars.
The Toy Story franchise has been Pixar’s flagship since 1995, with two sequels (1999 and 2010) that achieved even greater acclaim and box-office success than the original. But Toy Story 4 has had an unusually bumpy journey to the big screen. Originally slated for June 2017, the film’s release date has been pushed back (twice) to June 2019. In the interim, screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack left the film over “philosophical differences” with Pixar, calling it “a culture where women and people of color do not have an equal creative voice.” Also out the door: original director John Lasseter, who was replaced by Josh Cooley in July 2017 and stepped down from Pixar and Walt Disney animation a year later after allegations of sexual assault and harassment. The voice cast has been working on the film for years now, and Annie Potts (who voices Bo Peep) said in June that Pixar recently “threw out three-quarters” of the script and had it rewritten.
As for the story, Lasseter initially called it “a love story between Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) and Bo Peep.” There have been no official plot updates since the new release date was announced, but Hanks and Potts have both said they’re spending a lot of time in the recording studio together — so that relationship must play a role. Whatever happens, fans now know that they need to brace themselves for a tearful finale.
Toy Story 4 will open in theaters on June 21, 2019.
Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: