Pixar Short Films Ranked

It’s all been about Pixar in my house lately! I’ve been working on ranking and reviewing all the feature films from this groundbreaking animation studio for an upcoming article but, while awaiting access to the latest film, Inside Out 2, it occurred to me that something was missing. To write about Pixar’s feature films and not get into their amazing short films as well is to miss out on a huge, crucial part of the studio’s story and the Pixar experience. So, as the first of several Pixar articles, I’ve rewatched and ranked the studio’s short films. There are many spinoff shorts from the feature films, as well as the Sparkshorts series of independent shorts, all of which I’ll get to later but in the case of this list, I’ve focused on the original theatrical shorts only. So is Horny Snowman still a viable protagonist in this day and age? Are the cloud and the bird in Partly Cloudy a couple? Is there a scarier 80s Horror icon than Billy the baby? Find out the answers to these questions and more in Pixar Short Films Ranked!

20. LAVA

“Hey, “lava” kind of sounds like “love”, right?”
“… I mean, …I guess so.”
“That could be the basis for a whole seven minute short, right?”
“I’m not sure, do you think you could write an interminable song for it?”
“I know I could.”
“Sold!”

This, of course, is an unnecessarily mean take on James Ford Murphy’s singing volcano romance Lava, but I’m afraid this rather dreadful Pixar short brings out the long buried cynic in me. It’s not like I’m not an easy mark when it comes to sentimentality. Elsewhere in this list I’ve been totally won over by anthropomorphic umbrellas, lamps and animals. But a volcano? That’s a hell of a rigid, cumbersome protagonist, I hope you’ve got a pretty special story in mind to sell that notion. Nope!

To be fair, Lava is a pretty unusual concept, with its love story playing out over millions of years, but the relentless musical narration is so drippy and grindingly repetitive that it becomes hard to engage with the admittedly beautiful images of Hawaiian islands and crystalline oceans. There’s also something vaguely grotesque and creepy about the craggy protagonists that clashes with the lush backdrop. And if you’re not charmed by that “send me someone to lava” line then look out, because here it comes again! 

Oh Lava, you turn me into someone who’s hard to lava. I just wish I could be more magma-nanimous. Hey, if I could just set this to music!

19. SANJAY’S SUPER TEAM

Sanjay’s Super Team is one of the most personal Pixar shorts, to the point where writer/director Sanjay Patel essentially cast himself as the main character. But for all the deeply felt emotions that drive it, Sanjay’s Super Team is also one of the dullest Pixar shorts. It examines the conflict between Hindu traditions and the modern world and Patel ensures that the story is told in a universal way that allows for various conflicts, both religious and generational,to be projected onto it. That said, the film’s use of specific Hindu gods ensures it has a strong identity of its own in relation to its relevance to Patel himself. But if its generational and cultural bridge-building is admirable, its focus-pulling superhero narrative is all flash and noise and, while its point is clear, its execution already felt played out in the saturated market of 2015. At the very least its climactic coming together of father and son taps into a touching empathy that overrides the specifics of the story but as neither a religious man nor a superhero fan, Sanjay’s Super Team was probably always going to be a miss for me.

18. THE ADVENTURES OF ANDRÉ AND WALLY B

In the same way that Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is classed as a Studio Ghibli film despite its production predating the studio’s establishment, so The Adventures of André and Wally B is generally considered to be the first Pixar short, although at the time of its production the company was still known as Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project. Co-founder Alvy Ray Smith is the credited director but the banner name here is John Lasseter, whose groundbreaking computer animation helped spark interest in the medium that would ultimately lead to the production of Toy Story in just over a decade’s time. With this in mind, The Adventures of André and Wally B is testament to how much can happen in the space of ten years. Those watching this short without the passion and excitement of an animation historian will find little over which to enthuse. The story is negligible: an indeterminate humanoid creature named André awakens in a forest where he is confronted by a disproportionate bee. Fooling him with the old “look over there” gag, André makes his escape but the bee pursues his target and stings him. André takes revenge by knocking the bee out of the sky with his hat. That’s it as far as plot goes and anyone hoping to see something akin to the visual majesty of later Pixar projects will be sorely disappointed. But as a test piece to drum up interest, The Adventures of André and Wally B is still rather pleasing. Lasseter’s little touches, such as Andrés fourth-wall breaking eyebrow-flicks, apply stylistic wrinkles from classic animation to this technologically advanced version of the medium. Like Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull’s 1972 short A Computer Animated Hand, The Adventures of André and Wally B is a tough film to assign a star rating, since its importance exceeds its entertainment value. But unlike Catmull’s dry technical exercise, Lasseter’s work imbues the computer graphics with a rudimentary but undeniable sense of personality, an exciting development that recalls Winsor McCay’s pioneering creation of animated personality in 1914’s Gertie the Dinosaur. André is nowhere near as expressive as his prehistoric predecessor and Wally B is essential a flying brick, but Lasseter’s achievement in unlocking this potential should not be underestimated, especially since he would be directing Toy Story in only a decade’s time. For those who find this history exciting, The Adventures of André and Wally B is definitely worth a watch.

17. PIPER

Alan Barillaro’s Piper was hailed as a Pixar masterpiece by many and it bagged yet another Oscar for the company. There’s no denying, Piper is one of the most visually stunning things the studio had yet released, with its depiction of a small baby sandpiper overcoming its fear of water sometimes feeling like a photorealistic nature documentary. Unlike Disney’s attempts to remake its back catalogue by sucking out the charm of stylisation, Piper has plenty of cute little character beats that remind the viewer they are watching an animated short. But while the artistry is exemplary, Piper does become wearing over the course of its 6 minutes. I realise how that makes it sound as if I have no attention span whatsoever, but watching Piper makes me feel the same aversion to being prodded to find something adorable that made me rapidly lose patience with WALL-E. I am absolutely as wowed by the visuals of Piper as everyone else but its attempt to capture a small moment of beauty could’ve done with just a little more to sustain it than an incessant air of “Look at the bird, look at how cute it is. Cute cute cute cute cute.”

16. LOU

It’s tough to tell an emotionally satisfying story in 6 minutes. By the time of Dave Mullins’ Lou, the weight of expectations for Pixar shorts to deliver something both inventive and profound was beginning to weigh heavily on their quality. In the case of Lou, an unusual and promising premise about a creature made up of items of lost property quickly becomes a moralising anti-bullying story that seems to be straining to claim as many tears as it can milk from us. It’s frustrating because when Lou is more focused on its titular creation rather that the bully who learns to share, it is rather delightful. The playground setting is well realised and used effectively and Lou himself has a genuine mix of quirky appeal and uncanny edge. The burst of action as he battles the bully is the highlight. There’s no reason Lou shouldn’t become the moral lesson that it does. “Moralising” needn’t be an insult and kids benefit from this kind of example. But wasn’t there a time when Pixar shorts were, y’know, funny? It’s nice to have a mix of sentiment and laughter and this balance is part of what makes the Pixar canon so enduring but by 2017 it had been well over half a decade since a Pixar short put a premium on humour. I enjoy Lou but it does also make me want to put Presto on instead.

15. KNICK KNACK

John Lasseter’s final Pixar short and the studio’s final short of the 80s, Knick Knack has a very different flavour to the films that preceded it. Lasseter enjoyed total creative freedom at Pixar, so when Disney, who had fired Lasseter over his support for computer animation, tried to woo him back in light of his Oscar winning success with Tin Toy, Lasseter turned them down with the immortal line “I can go to Disney and be a director, or I can stay here and make history.” It’s interesting then that Lasseter’s next short was a far less ambitious piece based solely on his desire to make something that would be fun to create. In order to do this, Lasseter looked to his love of classic Hollywood animation and the work of Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. Jones’s influence can be felt heavily in Knick Knack’s gags, with the repeated attempts by a snowman to escape the confines of his snow globe immediately evoking memories of Wile E. Coyote’s relentless pursuit of the Road Runner. Avery’s influence, meanwhile, is perhaps most strongly felt in the adult sexual content. The snowman’s major motivation in Knick Knack is the presence of two temptresses who beckon to him from adjacent mementos. This is a quest fuelled by lust, something made especially clear in the original release of Knick Knack in which the female characters were given massively exaggerated breasts. The version you’re more likely to see these days is the 2003 re-release that accompanied Finding Nemo, for which Lasseter drastically reduced the cup sizes of the women and replaced a mermaid’s scanty starfish pasties with a more modest seashell bra. Lasseter stated that due to being a father he no longer felt comfortable with children seeing this content, although given the sexual misconduct that eventually brought his tenure at Pixar to an end, Knick Knack’s unfettered horniness may play equally as uncomfortably for adults. Still, there’s an edge to Knick Knack, as well as a likeable dedication to pure comedy, that makes it an enduring little entertainment.

14. RED’S DREAM

Despite the phenomenal reaction received by Pixar’s first short film Luxo Jr., the newly Oscar-nominated John Lasseter found himself working in a hallway while creating its follow-up. At this stage Pixar was still a failing hardware company and Lasseter’s small animation team was increasingly seen as a costly extravagance. Shunted out into a corridor when space got tight, Lasseter continued to demonstrate his dedication to his art, sleeping for days on end in the hallway while he worked on Red’s Dream. While the result was impressive enough to receive a positive reception, the response to Red’s Dream was predictably more muted than that received by Luxo Jr. That is not to say that Red’s Dream isn’t a good short. In a few ways, it even improves on Luxo Jr. The evocative, rain soaked streets that open the film show a significant progression from its predecessor’s simple black backdrop, and the increased pathos of the story displays a heightened ability to elicit an emotional response from an audience. Luxo Jr.’s fleeting moment of sadness was rectified with a happy ending but the titular unicycle in Red’s Dream is afforded no such compensation, returning sad and unwanted to the corner of the bicycle shop.

Where Red’s Dream fails to match Luxo Jr. is in consistent charm. The opening and closing sequences set in the bike shop are significantly better than the red unicycle’s dream. Lasseter’s ingenious use of lamps as characters in Luxo Jr. sidestepped the problem of how ugly human characters looked in early computer animation but Red’s Dream features an unavoidably grotesque clown which its creators nicknamed Lumpy for good reason. Clowns are creepy at the best of times so Lumpy’s ugliness isn’t as conspicuous as that of the truly horrifying baby that appeared in Lasseter’s next film, Tin Toy. But Lumpy isn’t the only problem. As a human surrogate, a unicycle just isn’t as expressive as a desk lamp and Lasseter can’t coax the same level of humanity from Red as he did so beautifully from Luxo Jr. It’s a shame because I absolutely adore the Noirish atmosphere and downbeat conclusion of Red’s Dream. It just can’t quite summon the winsome appeal that made Luxo Jr. so enduring. There’s no reprieve for poor old Red. Apart from the occasional animation enthusiast peering in through the window, the little unicycle that couldn’t remains forgotten in that dank bicycle shop corner.

13. FOR THE BIRDS

Ralph Eggleston’s For the Birds was the third Pixar short to win the Oscar for Best Animated Short and I recall it causing quite a stir in the cinema where I first saw it as the supporting film to Monsters, Inc. People went bananas for these little birds in a way that frankly baffled me at the time. Though I enjoyed For the Birds well enough, I couldn’t quite see what was supposedly so wonderful about it. Looking back now, I understand that this was symptomatic of my growing teenage cynicism and that the genius of For the Birds is not in its paper-thin premise but rather in its snappy execution. The humour doesn’t come simply from the notion of bullying birds accidentally catapulted into the sky by their awkward victim so much as the amusing design of those little blue puffballs and the juxtaposition between their strange cuteness and cruel malevolence. The squeaks and honks of the film’s soundtrack also greatly enhance the animation, with the moment that the small birds begin a chant to egg on the violent removal of the gangly undesirable making me laugh out loud. Good triumphs over evil, with the large bird literally having the last laugh, but the moral arrives more by accident than design, a mere byproduct of a hilarious event. This was probably my mistake first time round. Perhaps I was looking for something more profound when I should’ve just been surrendering to my urge to release the giggles. 

12. ONE MAN BAND

By the time One Man Band was released, the Pixar short was an established tradition, with a new one accompanying every feature release and booking a guaranteed spot amongst that year’s Oscar nominations. Although there was the impression that a dominant company was starting to elbow out more interesting independent efforts, Pixar’s work continued to be inventive and entertaining. It also provided the chance to direct for many upcoming animators and artists who may not otherwise have been given that opportunity. One Man Band was directed by Andrew Jiminez and Mark Andrews and their particular angle was to create a film based around music. A comic battle between two street buskers who go to evermore elaborate lengths to impress a small child with a coin to spend, One Man Band’s music was developed alongside the short as a direct response to and influence on the animation. It was composed by Michael Giacchino, who rapidly became one of Pixar’s go-to composers and later bagged an Oscar for his classic score for Up. Giacchino’s music and Jiminez and Andrews beautifully escalated farce are married up in an impressive manner that sometimes goes unnoticed by those focused solely on the film’s simple plot. One Man Band is a tightly orchestrated piece that delivers reliable laughs as its sleight-of-hand sleekness quietly impresses those more attuned to its subtler notes.

11. TIN TOY

Poor old Tinny. The protagonist of John Lasseter’s third Pixar short Tin Toy very nearly became a star when he was chosen as the lead in a proposed half-hour holiday special called A Tin Toy Christmas, to be made in collaboration with Disney. It’s easy to imagine this short having become a staple of festive schedules but ultimately it never happened. Instead, the basic concept of Tin Toy was used as the jumping off point for a little feature film named Toy Story which made superstars of a cowboy named Woody and a space ranger named Buzz. Tinny himself was 86’d. Still, Tinny hasn’t quite been consigned to the same level of obscurity as Pixar predecessor Red the Unicycle. Tin Toy won Pixar its first of many Oscars and its connection with the ever-popular Toy Story has ensured its place in history. Tinny would eventually be given his own fleeting cameo in Toy Story 4, which felt like a thank you to the little toy one-man-band for being such an integral part of the Pixar story.

If Tinny is a legend of animation, his co-star Billy the Baby is arguably one of the icons of 80s Horror. Realistic human characters were still beyond the reach of computer animation at this stage. Pixar would work out these kinks across the 90s but the oddly creepy humans of the first Toy Story do not even begin to compare to the untold dread of this tiny terror. Billy is supposed to be a threatening figure in the world of Tin Toy, with his penchant for putting toys in his mouth being a sort of preschool precursor to Sid’s toy torturing antics in Toy Story. But Billy is oblivious to his reign of destruction and Tinny’s initial reaction to him suggest that he is supposed to appear cute. Lasseter completely sells the high stakes horror but the primitive, lumpy graphics undermine the intended duality of Billy’s supposedly adorable destructiveness.

In terms of Tinny himself, Tin Toy displays Lasseter’s most sophisticated character work yet. His simple expressions convey every emotion with empathy and humour. The single room environment is not as evocative as the rain-soaked streets of Red’s Dream but small details like the pummelled plastic packaging, through which Billy appears even more grotesquely distorted, showcase impressive innovations and ambitious storytelling. The straightforward narrative is peppered with lovely touches. Really, Tin Toy’s inability to quite break down the barrier between important and classic hinges on the failure of the lumbering baby-beast. Billy has helped to ensure Tin Toy remains in the memories of a whole generation but some of them are still looking for ways to get it out of there.

10. BOUNDIN’

Bud Luckey’s Boundin’ broke the long established Pixar tradition of the dialogue-free short. Luckey’s film goes in the opposite direction, with Luckey himself providing a constant folksy narration of the events set to an upbeat musical accompaniment (also written by Luckey). The gentle wordplay is a delight, occasionally skirting a Dr. Seuss influence but largely retaining its own identity, while the very simple story is infectiously lively and heartening. A lamb’s pride in the magnificence of its own fleece causes it to dance in a manner that inspires similarly joyous gyrations in other animals. But when the lamb is sheared against its will, it takes the advice of a friendly jackalope to put the spring back in its step. Though its story is slight, the metaphorical restoration of joy in the characters inspires the same in the viewer and Boundin’ imparts its good natured wisdom in a breezily invigorating manner. Though not one of the more well-known Pixar shorts, Boundin’ is one of the most purely enjoyable. 

9. DAY & NIGHT

Written and directed by Teddy Newton, Day & Night continued to bring new things to the table in the world of Pixar shorts. In this case, it was the blending of 2D and 3D animation, with the titular main characters being traditionally hand-drawn figures and the scenes that play out beneath their see-through torsos being rendered in CG. Although many critics hailed Day & Night as groundbreakingly unique, there’s a strong sense of Warner Bros.’ experiential minimalist shorts like Now Hear This or The Hole Idea about it. The concept is strong though and the execution is often excellent, with the scenes inside each character’s body reflecting their respective times of day while also paralleling certain human behaviours. There are a couple of problems with Day & Night. The main characters leering over bikini clad women feels a little gratuitous now but if you think I’m being too “woke” (and if you do think like that, congratulations on managing at least one thought, I guess), my other problem with Day & Night is how much it oversells its message of positive diversity. As was the case in the dialogue-free Pixar shorts that preceded it, Day & Night makes its point more than adequately through pantomime. The moment a radio broadcast by Dr. Wayne Dyer is added to the soundtrack, the film becomes too heavy-handed and overtly preachy. Fortunately, by this time Day & Night has done enough to charm and convince, but if it had only stuck the landing it might’ve ranked a little more highly for me.

8. BAO

By the time Bao arrived, Pixar shorts had changed a lot. Though still bright, colourful and inventive, the mood had shifted from lively comedy towards light whimsy and didacticism. Even the gag-filled Day & Night couldn’t stop itself descending into heavy-handed messaging. The latter approach had turned out some wonderful films but after several years of wise and wistful stories, the urge to watch a rabbit brutalise a magician or a large bird catapult a load of smaller birds into the sky was growing strong. Although Bao wasn’t the film to completely turn this trend around, it did deliver a film in which the prominent heart was supplemented by a barrage of great visual gags. Helmed by future Turning Red director Domee Shi, the first female director of a Pixar short, Bao’s unusual tale of a Chinese-Canadian mother who nurtures a bao bun that comes to life has the feel of a classic folktale, especially with its momentarily grisly ending. This moment, in which the mother eats her surrogate dumpling child in order to stop him flying the nest, is immediately followed by the revelation that what we have been watching was allegorical, and that the mother is longing to reconcile with her own human son. The emotional conclusion aligns Bao with the latter-day Pixar shorts but its quirky premise and humour deliver the gut-punch by way of plentiful laughs. Like Partly Cloudy, arguably the bridging film between the two eras, Bao feels like it has a foot in both camps, a balancing act that is to its credit. Shi won the Oscar for her oddball tale, setting her up as one of Pixar’s most interesting and unique voices.

7. LIFTED

By 2006, Pixar shorts had become a great testing ground for new upcoming talent. So how come Lifted was directed by a man who had already won seven Oscars? Gary Rydstrom, Lifted’s writer/director, is actually better known as a sound designer who worked on some of the biggest films of the late twentieth century, including Terminator 2, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan and Jurassic Park. He had also been working with Pixar in that capacity since as early as Luxo Jr. But Lifted was Rydstrom’s debut as a director, giving him the opportunity to broaden his skill set even further. 

The premise and screenplay for Lifted are terrific. It follows the attempts of a clumsy young alien to pass his human abduction test, overseen by a stoic, amorphous instructor. Faced with a bewildering array of identical switches, the alien jabs at them randomly as we watch his human test subject flung around his bedroom, somehow still asleep and oblivious. Rydstrom drew on his own experiences of struggling to use complex sound mixing equipment while being watched. As is customary in most Pixar shorts up to this point, Lifted plays out without dialogue, its comic effect more than adequately achieved through the various bumps, crashes, groans and thuds on the soundtrack. Rydstrom even throws in the ubiquitous Wilhelm scream sound effect, a nod to his professional origins. If Rydstrom had any misgivings about directing, they are not visible on screen. Lifted is a confident, hilarious debut and ranks highly with the best Pixar miniatures.

6. PARTLY CLOUDY

I’ve loved Peter Sohn’s Partly Cloudy since I first saw it in the cinema as the supporting short for Up. An extension of the opening scenes from Disney’s Dumbo, in which storks delivers babies to various animals, Sohn’s film reasons that if the birds fly out of the clouds then the babies must be made by the clouds themselves. The story focuses on a storm cloud whose natural inclination is to create slightly more dangerous baby animals. While his fluffy contemporaries are churning out puppies and kittens, the storm cloud creates creatures that bite, sting and otherwise inflict pain on those who get too close. Each cloud has its own stork to deliver its creations and the storm cloud’s stork is a suitably harassed, exhausted bird whose deliveries are perilous. The genius of Partly Cloudy is in its exploration of the relationship between the stork and the storm cloud. They are not merely depicted as colleagues but mutually adoring friends. There is a level of affection between them that makes it easy to take them as lovers, with each stork/cloud relationship representing a romantic partnership. Certainly, that is how I took Partly Cloudy the first time I saw it and the only way I’ve been able up take it since then. For me, it enhances the dramatic tension of the film’s ingenious twist, when the storm cloud believes the stork has left it for another cloud. Whatever the nature of the central relationship however, Partly Cloudy is a sweet, clever film about the sacrifices we make for those we love. 

5. PRESTO

Every so often, a Pixar short will doff its cap to classic Hollywood animation. John Lasseter had done so with his Chuck Jones/Tex Avery pastiche Knick Knack. As a lover of classic animation, I was delighted to see Knick Knack’s obvious debt to some of my heroes but, while the short has its own edgy charm, the gags just weren’t funny enough to pay adequate tribute to such titans of the medium. Doug Sweetland’s Presto, however, is a different matter. Opening with beautiful stylised credits that overtly reference the traditionally animated shorts of yesteryear, Presto goes on to deliver in terms of both visual appeal and gags per second. The premise of an arrogant rabbit whose magician master neglects to feed him sets up a suitably hateful figure whose subsequent misfortune we can relish to the nth degree. In pursuit of a carrot which the magician callously denies him, the rabbit sets about sabotaging his act utilising a couple of magic hats that form a mystical portal into each other. Through the rabbit’s manipulations, the magician ends up battered, pummelled, catapulted and electrocuted, while his oblivious audience dutifully applauds each humiliation. Presto is such a deliciously unforgiving short that the only thing keeping it from receiving a perfect score is its cop out finale in which the rabbit feels sorry for the magician and rescues him from an imminent flattening by a piano. Now that’s not how they did it in the classics. Everyone knows you let the bastard get squashed and then watch him play his own funeral march on the piano keys that are now where his teeth should be!

4. GERI’S GAME

There had been no Pixar shorts for eight years when Geri’s Game appeared as the supporting film to A Bug’s Life. Pixar had changed a lot since John Lasseter’s highly influential clutch of 80s shorts helped transform the company from a hardware firm into a film studio, and with Lasseter now focusing his talents on feature productions, co-founder Ed Catmull decided to greenlight the return of the Pixar short as a proving ground for new directors and technical innovations. Step forward Jan Pinkava, an animator who joined Pixar to work on their TV commercials and had been pushing for the opportunity to make his own short. Pinkava’s wish was granted, on the proviso that his film have a human character as its star. Pixar had been struggling to perfect humans since Lasseter’s Baby Billy had terrified a generation in the Oscar-winning short Tin Toy. Pinkava’s creation, the elderly Geri, easily trumped all the studio’s previous attempts at human characters, even those in Toy Story. Geri is a stylised creation but his exaggerated features do not detract from his humanity. For his contribution, Geri was given a cameo appearance in Toy Story 2.

Geri’s Game won Pixar its second Oscar and it remains one of their most ambitious and unusual shorts. It features just one character but he is bifurcated in a surreal manner. The premise of the short finds Geri sitting at a table in an empty, beautifully autumnal park and setting up a chess board, on which he proceeds to play a game against himself. The early stages show the full, painstaking progress of Geri hauling his aging bones from one chair to the other but soon we see the game play out in quick crosscuts which make it appear as if there are two players at the table. The two Geri’s begin to display different personalities, with one being cruel and cocky, the other tentative and vulnerable. But the quieter Geri ultimately turns the tables on his bulldozing opponent with a wily trick of his own.

Geri’s Game is brilliantly animated, with Pinkava’s impeccable comic timing shining through, but its peculiar premise and execution are equally important in making it stand out as one of Pixar’s best. Although the story is absurdist, there is an undercurrent of sadness. Are we just seeing an eccentric man playfully killing some time or is this odd behaviour the result of intense loneliness and the onset of senility? There’s a lightheartedness that keeps such concerns appropriately subtextual but there’s also a pervasive sense of melancholy that makes Geri’s Game riveting beyond its ambition to entertain.

3. LUXO JR.

Proof that magic can be created in less than two minutes, Luxo Jr. is an iconic short that changed the industry’s perception of computer animation’s capabilities. Produced, written and directed by John Lasseter for unveiling at the 1986 SIGGRAPH, an annual computer graphics conference attended by thousands of industry professionals, Luxo Jr. won over the crowd to the extent that they gave it a standing ovation before its minuscule runtime was even over. While the previous Lasseter-animated The Adventures of André and Wally B had broken new ground and stimulated interest in the medium of computer animation, Luxo Jr. broke down the barrier to commercial potential. By focusing on a pair of desk lamps as his characters, Lasseter temporarily sidestepped the problem of how ugly and cumbersome humanoid or animal characters appeared in embryonic CG. But Lasseter’s greatest achievement here was how convincingly he imbued these inanimate objects not only with life but with palpable emotions. Lasseter’s original intention was to make a plotless character study but, on the advice of Belgian animator Raoul Servais (whose work you should all check out immediately, by the way) Lasseter came up with a two minute scenario with a beginning, middle and end. This not only enhanced the effect of the emotions the lamps display, it also made the film damn near irresistible. Pixar would go on to become renowned for their storytelling prowess and it is present here in miniature. We are first introduced to the larger parent lamp whose movements outline the concept, then at just the right moment we are introduced to the capering baby lamp, Luxo Jr. itself, whose adorably enthusiastic pursuit of a ball was enough to bring a roomful of graphics experts to their feet.

Luxo Jr.’s appeal was validated across the board. The film received an Oscar nomination and spawned a short series of sequels as animated inserts on Sesame Street. Best of all, Luxo Jr. became the iconic Pixar mascot, appearing alongside the studio logo at the beginning of each of their films and deflating the I in Pixar in the same way it flattens the ball in this history-making couple of minutes. It’s fortunate that Luxo Jr. was officially the first film released under the Pixar name as the fitting tribute of becoming the company’s mascot could only have gone to a character whose simple charm ensured its unfading longevity. It’s hard to imagine André and Wally B lumbering and snickering their way across the screen before Ratatouille.

2. LA LUNA

Enrico Casarosa’s La Luna is an absolutely ravishing short, with Casarosa utilising the same instantly appealing, rounded character designs that would make his later Pixar feature Luca so uncomplicatedly beguiling. Italian cartoonist Osvaldo Cavandoli’s animated series La Linea and the work of Ghibli master Hayao Miyazaki were stated influences but the feeling I get from La Luna is the same as the one I get from watching the more ethereal, less gag-heavy cartoons from the Golden Age, mostly by Disney or MGM. There’s a sweet vein of humour in La Luna but it is subservient to an overall ambience of quiet awe. There’s a message about how it is possible to simultaneously follow in the footsteps of your predecessors and dance to your own tune, and it is delivered with a light touch that characterises the whole glorious seven minutes. The notion of three generations of janitors whose job it is to sweep the moon clean of fallen stars is inherently magical and it is realised to its fullest potential through sumptuous visuals and wonderful sound effects, from the mumbled gibberish of the characters’ verbal communications to the jangling clatter of feet traipsing ankle deep through piles of stars. This is one of a handful of Pixar shorts that manages to encapsulate the studio at its best in a fleeting runtime.

1. THE BLUE UMBRELLA

It was quite a shock when Saschka Unseld’s The Blue Umbrella wasn’t even shortlisted for the Best Animated Short Oscar. Since the production of short films was resurrected by Pixar in 1997, the studio seemed almost guaranteed a nomination whenever they put something out. Only Partly Cloudy (one of the better Pixar shorts to my mind) had missed out but that was at least in the running. The Blue Umbrella missed the shortlist altogether. Although I generally root for independent shorts to take the nominations, The Blue Umbrella happened to be my favourite Pixar short yet. Although the plot is a fairly simple tale of romance and the kindness of strangers, Unseld’s execution is absolutely impeccable. He creates a whole world going on above and below the eyeline of humans and then fills the frame with throngs of oblivious people. With camera angles reflecting the viewpoints of drainpipes, street signs and the umbrellas themselves, the film makes an almost photorealistic rendering of a street seem positively otherworldly. The viewer can practically feel the constant lashing rain but the warmth of the story ensures that they also remain blissfully aware of the cosy armchair from which they are watching it. A masterpiece of atmosphere and everyday magic, The Blue Umbrella remains my favourite Pixar short.