May 29: Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 2 (2012 -- Various)

★★★

This set of Pixar offerings looks like a creative studio becoming more cautious and a little stale.  Among the most cautious and stale are Mater’s tall tale of being a pilot, Air Mater, and his adventure in Time Travel Mater.  From the Cars franchise, neither of these two shorts is interesting or original but instead rely on what are now stock characters doing little unexpected.  Likewise, Hawaiian Vacation and Small Fry have the familiar Toy Story characters acting the same way they do in the three feature-length films and in the other shorts.  There’s not much new or clever here either but rather a remix of elements that fans of the movies already know.

Presto is pretty much a Warner take-off, though it’s so fast and visually witty that it scores a few laughs as a rabbit tries to get a carrot from his magician master.  The funniest film in this collection is the Wall-E spin, Burn-E.  Like Presto, Burn-E isn’t surprisingly original, but it mines the same silent comedy practices as Wall-E, and the laughs can bring tears.

Most of the other offerings here come from previous Pixar work, too.  There’s an overlong animated “documentary,” Your Friend the Rat, that is hosted by Remy and Emile from Ratatouille, but it lacks the snap and clever engagement of the feature.  The two Up spin-offs also lack sparkle .  Dug’s Special Mission has the good natured Golden Retriever creating Roadrunner-like situations for his aggressive pack-mates, and George & A.J. has retirees resorting to fantastic attempts to avoid the nursing home.  This film has a clever premise, but the animators don’t get much beyond silly in their conception. Overall, this entire group of nine short films in the collection imply a stagnation in Pixar's work on animated shorts, a reliance on tried-and-true characters and situations with little of the excitement of innovation that Pixar has brought to the genre in the past.

In fact, only three of the shorts in this collection represent original efforts in new directions, and only two of those have much engaging originality.  In Partly Cloudy, a dark cloud creates the bad babies of the world that a bedraggled stork has to deliver, while bright clouds create the good babies for the happy storks.  This film doesn’t develop anything unexpected.  On the other hand, Day and Night has two transparent characters whose outlines reveal scenes during, respectively, day and night.  Not only is this concept highly original, but the film even develops a story involving the two.  This is a fascinating short film that is simultaneously self-reflexive and traditionally narrative.  It’s one of the most imaginative shorts in either of the two Pixar collections.

La Luna is similarly engaging, though for different reasons.  This coming of age short has a boy caught between his father and his grandfather as he tries to create his own identity.  The film has wonderful imagination, like the way the boat anchors itself to the moon and the task the men have of cleaning the stars from the moon's surface, and it has a simple story that feels like a fairy tale.  An Italian feeling in the work ranges from the characters' hand gestures and speech rhythms to the costumes and the music.  La Luna won the Academy Award for animated short this year, and it deserved it.