Before the magic had even begun… Andre and Wally B was one of the first pieces of animation that John Lasseter created at Pixar… well at the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project, as it was then known! It is hard to believe that this was created in 1984. What. That is before I was born!
When you look at Pixar’s collection of short films, you really start to see how they set themselves apart from every other studio in America. It is a real testament to everyone who works within those great doors in Emeryville that these shorts are loved just as much as their features are. Let alone that nine of the shorts have been nominated for academy awards, three of them winning.
After the first few shorts, John Lasseter stepped out of the director chair and made way for long-time Pixar artists like Doug Sweetland and Peter Sohn to step up and create something of their own. Bud Luckey, who has been at Pixar since 1992, directed my favourite Pixar short, Boundin’. He is probably most beloved for his work creating animated shorts for Sesame Street. Here is one of those films, #7 The Alligator King, and if you watch this work next to Boundin’ you can really see the personality in his work, even down to the narration and singing, all done by Luckey himself!
And the director role isn’t just handed to the animators – Lifted was directed by multi-academy award winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom. This paved the way for Rydstrom to move onto his first feature, Newt, which has unfortunately just been cancelled.
If you haven’t yet watched the full collection together as a whole, I definitely recommend picking up the dvd or bluray and watching them from start to finish. It is here, and not in the features, that you really see the incredible technological development of 3D animation that Pixar have achieved. And it looks like these boundaries are about to be pushed once again when we all go along on opening night to watch Toy Story 3, getting there nice and early to watch Day & Night, Teddy Newton’s first shot as director, and one of Pixar’s only films to use 2D animation. As you will see in this video, it looks like this is going to be like nothing we have ever seen.