You wouldn’t lose much money if you bet consistently on Pixar producing the most artistically interesting material in the Disney company, and Pixar’s short films have historically been winners. It’s not exactly shocking, then, to find some great stuff in a project like SparkShorts dedicated to giving Pixar animators a blank canvas to do innovative original work.
Smash and Grab
That doesn’t mean the three 9-minute shorts available for preview are all of equal quality, or that their strengths and weaknesses are all in the same areas. Brian Larsen’s Smash and Grab begins with a science-fiction scenario involving two robots tasked with fueling a train making its way through an alien landscape. Larsen tries to build some character work into his dialogue-free scenario, with the two mechanized workers teaming up to escape their enslavement, but it never quite provides either a strong sense of the robots’ personality, á la WALL-E, or a compelling allegory for whatever they’re trying to get away from, or strive toward. It is, however, a stunningly designed piece, with airborne cities seemingly tethered to earth like balloons, and an idea reminiscent of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds where the alien civilization’s robots are created with bodies mimicking their creators. As world-building, it’s an unqualified success; as storytelling, a bit less so.
Purl
There’s a much clearer narrative thread (no pun intended) in Kristen Lester’s Purl, in which a sentient ball of yarn begins a new job in the finance industry and finds herself alone among the heterogeneous suit-wearing bros of B.R.O. capital. As an allegory for workplaces lacking in demographic diversity and the temptation to fall in line with the prevailing culture—it’s hard not to wonder how this reflects the filmmaker’s experience as a woman in the male-dominated computer animation field—it’s straightforward almost to a fault, and not exactly subtle in the point it’s trying to make. It’s still fun to watch, particularly as things get a little more “adult” in a montage where our woolly heroine goes out on the town with her co-workers.
Kitbull
Everything comes together perfectly, however, in Rosanna Sullivan’s Kitbull, in which a stray kitten finds a new “roommate” in the yard where it lives: a pit bull terrier that’s being trained to fight. It’s a wordless story, like Smash and Grab, beautifully animated in soft tones that suggest chalk art. Sullivan captures the frantic glories of a kitten at play, rolling madly in seemingly arbitrary directions while playing with a bottle cap, and an almost heartbreaking friendship that develops between the two animals even as one of them is initiated into a life of violence. Like the best of Pixar’s work, it’s sweet, funny, lump-in-your-throat storytelling, efficiently creating an engrossing story in a matter of minutes.
More to Come from Pixar
If finding the next great filmmaking talent at Pixar is the goal of SparkShorts, it’s off to a pretty good start. For this preview, we saw the first three in the collection, and are there are more set to release in the coming months with the start of Disney+. Watching these shorts are an effortless way to fall in love with a short-format form of visual storytelling.
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Let’s Hear From You About Pixar’s SparkShorts
Are you a Pixar fan? Glad to see Disney+ investing in short films? Looking forward to the Disney+ launch, or perhaps apprehensive? Let us know what you are thinking in the comments below.