The Lost Art of Pixar Short Films

A pre-established sense of what Disney-Pixar films were must have given me something to expect when I went to see Cars in 2006 with my father and sister – one of my earliest memories of the cinema. But when the lights went down, we saw something that was very much not the film we were promised, a vignette about two gauchely extravagant musicians harassing a cute peasant girl for her sole coin: a short film about the market for attention and the value one can make out of mere spare change, with no dialogue, which was vaguely sinister to my young mind. Once, you would go to see an original Pixar film at the cinema expecting to be blown away by astutely resonant emotions projected onto bugs or fish or cars, but would be forced to think about even more thematics due to being briefly launched into a different story.

Short films have always been essential to the creativity bubbling in the Pixar cauldron. However, the first-ever Pixar film, ​“The Adventures of André & Wally B.” (spearheaded by John Lasseter), a one-minute endeavor from the Year of Our Lord 1984, is far from a cinematic masterpiece – its primary purpose was to showcase the then-burgeoning animation medium. For the rest of the ​‘80s, the newly-minted Pixar team (a spinout from Lucasfilm) kept developing their brazen new artform by producing shorts, but ​“Luxo Jr.” (1986) was where the ethos of Pixar really began: where they would make something as unremarkable as a desk lamp into a relatable character, expressing a tender exasperation towards a smaller lamp as it jumps on a star-adorned ball, replicating the reaction of a parent with a hyperactive kid.

Pixar exploded in the ​‘90s when they partnered with Disney and pulled off the long-standing dream of making a feature-length film, then two, then three. The beloved tradition of purposefully pairing a short with a main feature was born with ​“Geri’s Game”, which accompanied A Bug’s Life in 1998. The practice was inherently special both because of the classic cinematic essence of a music-only cartoon shown before the main film, and the opportunity to showcase new talent experimenting with genre and technique. As Pixar became synonymous with game-changing innovation and nearly flawless storytelling, the shorts became an outlet with two purposes. The tie-ins were for doing fun (frankly unhinged) things with their film characters (all-time greats are ​“Jack-Jack Attack” and ​“Mater and the Ghostlight”). The standalones, however, were another ingredient in the alchemical process of challenging viewers, offering a necessary acidic twist because they were free to be sombre, inconclusive, or just outright mean.

That brings me back to my ancient moviegoing experience and ​“One Man Band”, which was well-chosen to aggregate Cars’ central theme of the hollowness of fame. We see the first one-man band, with an unhealthy abundance of percussives and trumpets on his person, in a depressingly empty square. A giddy peasant girl appears and approaches the fountain to make a wish, before her attention is drawn to the drummer. Another busker materialises, just as outrageously decked out but favouring winds and strings, and pulls her attention away. Things escalate to a full-blown musical battle, and the startled girl drops her coin down a grate.

Woe to the starving artist! But while the drummer might have garnered sympathy at first, the musicians descend into viciously groveling for just one coin, for one bit of validation. In hindsight, it’s doubtful that they would actually need the money to survive when they have the means to get so much equipment. The girl, on the other hand, demands a spare violin and plays an impressively advanced piece, showing pure talent rather than bells and whistles — and is immediately rewarded when an unseen passerby drops a whole sack of coins in front of her, which she does not share.

In the years that followed, more transcendent shorts were shown ahead of some of the best films of the 21^st century. ​“Lifted” (2006) is tantamount to horror and makes an alien abduction akin to a driving test, while ​“Presto” (2008) takes the concept of a tuxedo-wearing magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat and turns it into an extravaganza of Looney Tunes physical humor. As far as pairing them with Ratatouille and WALL‑E, respectively, you might think they should have traded.

Day & Night (2010) had the appropriate creative heft to be screened ahead of something as symbolically significant in Pixar’s history as Toy Story 3, the short a seamless amalgamation of 2D and 3D in concert with an organic storyline about moving from hostility to friendship by way of embracing each other’s differences. ​“Partly Cloudy” (2009, paired with Up in paradigmatic visual harmony; helmed by future Elemental director Peter Sohn) is less complex, but it puts a spin on an established trope in a manner that is the bread and butter of Pixar: If you believe that storks deliver baby animals, well, don’t a few have to be responsible for more dangerous ones like alligators, sharks, and electric eels?

We thankfully got some late-stage winners with ​“Piper” (2016) and ​“Bao” (2018). The former went with Finding Dory like wine and cheese as another nautical tale imbued with the spirits of children venturing into the big, scary world. ​“Bao” (from Domee Shi, Turning Red and Elio) is a fantastical, tearjerking treatise on overbearing parenting, reconciliation, and the communal significance of food. ​“Bao” was also the last original Pixar short to be screened ahead of a film (the also heavily family-centric Incredibles 2) before the track record becomes spotty. 

In some sickening cases, the Disney bosses used the space to promote their IP. Turning Red, Luca, and Soul​’s releases were all disrupted by the pandemic, but they later received theatrical re-releases and were paired with already-revealed shorts (the SparkShorts ​“Kitbull” and ​“Burrow” with Turning Red and Soul, and the throwback ​“For the Birds” with Luca). Toy Story 4 and Lightyear through Hoppers were shown with no short film at all.

In addition to more franchise spinoffs, Pixar did produce the generally delightful SparkShorts on Disney+ (2019−2024), a collection of original short films resulting from a program intended to nurture up-and-coming animators at the studio. Producer Lindsey Collins said in 2022 that budgetarily, they can produce more shorts for streaming and work with more new artists vs. the theatrical release route. With SparkShorts, they have moved away from the zero-dialogue rule once imposed to evoke a modern version of Silly Symphony and other pre-movie cartoons of old, but this is forgivable. The real loss is that they aren’t shown in theaters anymore, which was the whole point: the compulsory exercise of pondering two original stories rather than one in the cinematic setting.

When we talk about the film industry today, we talk about how hard it is to get people to pay money to see one original work, let alone two. Frankly, Pixar bringing the original shorts back to theaters – or another company adopting the practice – could be like forcing audiences to go on a much-needed walk through nature after a long stretch of cabin fever. It could be transformative, leaving us wanting more, creating further opportunities to stir the pot with risky ideas that need no dialogue, and setting off firing neurons in our minds. To infinity and beyond, as it were.