Pixar’s First Shorts

Pixar’s first ventures into making animated films began with a series of short films written, directed, and animated by John Lasseter.  With his training from CalArts and his experience with Disney, he led the way into character animation with computers.  His main concern was that the computer animation not lose the feeling and believability that Disney had.  He had a gift with bringer inanimate objects to life without giving them faces or features, but by simply making their movements imitate human movements.  In Luxo jr., Lasseter closely matched the movements of the younger lamp to those of a child.  Luxo jr. was received very well at SIGGRAPH in 1986.  Even the previously skeptical Frank Thomas was astounded by the short film and changed his mind about computer animation.  Lasseter had successfully given the illusion of life to a lamp.  In the next short that he created, Red’s Dream, Lasseter brought another inanimate object to life, this time a bicycle.  The film features a small unicycle in a bicycle shop that dreams of being in the circus.  With subtle head titles and cautious looking peddles, Red seems effortlessly brought to life.  This film was also very well received at SIGGRAPH by the animation community.  The next short that Lasseter completed was Tin Toy, which won the academy award in 1989.  It was the first time that a human was attempted in a computer animation and while they had not quite perfected the model or movements, the result was still remarkable for the time.  Lasseter, however, was not pleased with the outcome of the baby because it was not very life like.  The next short completed by Lasseter was Knick Knack, the story of a toy snowman who falls in love with a female toy figurine, but the only problem is he is stuck in a snow globe.  The frustration and anxiety can be seen plainly on the simple face of the snowman (made up of a few pieces of coal for the eyes and mouth and a carrot nose).  Lasseter successfully made computer animation a viable option for animators by demonstrating that emotion did not necessarily have to be lost in the process.