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!

Pixar Day

A friend of mine at work recently told me that he finally got round to watching the Pixar film "Cars". We both agreed that while it's a decent enough film, it's not what we'd consider to be Pixar's best work. In the end we couldn't decide what was the "best" that Pixar had to offer simply because there's several to choose from (including Wall-E and the Toy Story trilogy), but it did inspire me to have a small Pixar Day!

Up Adventure Book by AlbumOptions

The first one I watched was Up. I think it's a film that will go down in history simply through being the film that makes everyone cry in the first ten minutes and manages to show a couple's life with no words and some beautiful music. No matter how often I watch the film I end up getting very teary-eyed. Adventure is out there!

Chibi: Merida from Brave by CuteChibisandMore

The second film I watched was Brave. I never got round to watching it when it was in the cinema, so I added it to my Lovefilm DVD rental list and it arrived this week, so I made it part of my Pixar day! I liked it, although I don't think it's ever going to be my favourite. However I did think the animation for Merida's hair was incredible, and really shows the talent that Pixar has in it's studios.

I think everyone deserves a Pixar now and then, if some of you aren't now scouring your shelves for DVDs to watch then I haven't done this post right!

Have a nice day!