

In it, an overeager lamp child plays while his parent watches with caution. documents in computer animation that was groundbreaking for its time. "So I looked at the lamp and wondered, what would a baby lamp look like?" What resulted is as elemental as a game of ball between a father and son - which is basically what Luxo Jr. "I was noticing how the scale of a child’s head to his body was very different, and is part of what makes him really cute," he said. Lasseter, as he explained in an old interview with Entertainment Weekly, was inspired by the Luxo lamp on his desk and his co-worker's newborn baby. Pixar was a fledgling enterprise when president Ed Catmull asked John Lasseter to make something to show off at an upcoming conference. No short on this list is more influential than 1986's Luxo Jr., the piece of animation that defined Pixar's brand and birthed its desk lamp mascot. As Patel told The Verge in 2015, "It felt really important to me to have America see this, and have Pixar and Disney say it's normal." - SFG Pixar But the specifics here also marked a major moment when the short debuted, representing the studio’s first onscreen depiction of Indian family life.


Sanjay’s Super Team covers a wide emotional range in mere minutes, and it becomes universal in large part because of its specifics. As the deities Hanaman, Durga, and Vishnu come to life, you’ll find yourself on the edge of your seat, and as Sanjay returns from his journey of self-discovery, you'll find yourself wiping a tear off your cheek. The resulting spectacle is a blast, punctuated by a new technique Patel called "illogical lighting," that marvelously warped sense of reality. Sanjay Patel injected this semi-autobiographical archetypal father-son relationship with Hindu mythology to create something at once unique and relatable. One of Pixar’s most exciting shorts, Sanjay’s Super Team centers on a young Indian boy learning to embrace his culture, and closing the generational chasm between him and his father. (Note: This list only includes the short films that ran before Pixar's feature films in theaters.) Pixar In honor of Bao's arrival, we've ranked these little masterpieces. Take, for instance, the company's latest: Bao, which screens with Incredibles 2, manages to go to some unsettling places while also generating deep sentiment for an animated dumpling. Pixar began more as an experimental animation incubator, testing the medium's limits through short films, and these are still where its creators flex, testing out new technology and strange storylines. While the shorts are often sweetly charming, they shouldn't be written off as fluff.

Along the way, it has won some Oscars for these endeavors - most recently picking up one for the splendid seaside romp Piper in 2017. In them, the studio has snuck in bits of its company history, wove in threads from its bigger works, and let emerging artists shine. The company has been showcasing the smaller work of its animators alongside its feature films for almost as long as it's been making the latter. Before they saw Toy Story 3, they got an almost abstract hybrid of 2-D and 3-D animation as two blobs representing "day" and "night" tussled. Before Pixar fans went to go see A Bug's Life, they got a brief meditation on aging and loneliness.
