DVD Review - Pixar Short Films

My Youngest Little Sister celebrated her birthday back in January. She has decided that she would like to work for Pixar one day, so I bought her two DVDs of Pixar's "short films", the little specials that they show before their main films and some of the extras they've done over the years. She's already watched them, obviously since her birthday was months ago, but since I was home this weekend and hadn't seen them yet we decided to watch them together.

Pixar Short Films Collection Volume 1 from Amazon

The first volume starts with their older work, computer animation from 1984! I must admit, this was a year before I was born, and I'm stunned at the quality of it. Computer animation has come on a lot over the years, especially over the past decade where it seems to have raced forward in terms of quality, so I genuinely thought the first film was actually from the early 1990's. That was, however, until we got up to "Tin Toy", while animating toys and backgrounds was fine it appears that animating babies was incredibly difficult. YLS did warn me about the "freaky baby" in it but even I wasn't prepared for how terrifyingly bad it was. I think that's where the difference has been over the years, animation of people is now far, far better than it used to be.

Pixar Short Films Collection Volume 2 from Amazon

The second volume contains more recent work, including "Presto" (which was originally shown with Wall-E) and "Day and Night" (which was shown with Toy Story 3). There's also "Cars Toons", several short films involving the characters from the Cars franchise, and Toy Story Toons which have the characters from Toy Story. I must admit that I found volume two to be a little more tedious, I'm not a big fan of the "Cars" series, although the Toy Story ones were quite funny, but I would have preferred more of the proper original works. On the other hand the final one, La Luna, was absolutely gorgeous.

If you know someone who is a fan of Pixar's work then I would recommend these DVDs for them. The first volume effectively showcases the work that led to Toy Story, which was a ground-breaking movie in it's time (which makes me feel SO old XD), while the second shows some simply beautiful artwork and animation, as well as the usual lovely storylines that Pixar are so well known for. I am amazed that they can get so much across on screen with little or no dialogue.

Have a nice day everyone!