Pixar Shorts Not Short on Anything:

Why buy a disk when you have most of the material already in your collection? I already had 9 out of the 13 shorts on this disk and parts of 2 of the other short films on interview and documentary recordings. Of the special Sesame Street Luxo specials I already had Light and Heavy, the best of the lot. So why was this disk so high on my Christmas list?






I didn`t have a copy of Andre & Wally B. I didn`t have a copy of Red`s Dream and I only had parts of Knick Knack and Tin Toy.







Those lacks are painful. That was my reasons for wanting this DVD. But the reason I am so happy that I got this collection is the documentary - The Pixar Shorts: A Short History.



The high light of this documentary for me is Jim Blinn from JPL with a whole rendering / surfacing system named after him just geeking out over what the guys at Pixar where doing in those early days.

And what they were doing, what John was doing, was animation. Animation with a new untried limited set of tools.

Conventional wisdom would seem to say that the later, more polished, films are better. But conventional wisdom would be dead wrong.

The early Pixar shorts are ground breaking. There is a raw power and joy to them. They are limited and their importance rests in the very limitations of the early tools and the genius that made a story within the limitations of the tool set.

Good storytelling does not have limited shelve life after the wow factor is gone. These early Pixar shorts are closer to John`s Oscar (R) winning student short Lady and the Lamp then they are to Finding Nemo.

To be able to watch all the Pixar shorts in the order of their creation is a real treat, an education and an important action for anybody with the slightest interest in the field of animation.

It is not about computer vs pencil. It is about animated storytelling. It is still hard to believe that there were people, just a few short years ago, running major animation studios who did not know that.