Day & Night (2010)

This short was nominated for an Academy Award for Animated Short. There will be spoilers ahead: This is a very simple but effective short, based on the premise that two different entities showcase whatever point they occupy during the day or at night and whatever is happening on the spot at a particular point in time is visible within their frame.One of the more interesting and entertaining aspects of this short for me is that what the viewer sees within the characters frequently corresponds with what that character or those characters are doing. It's done quite effectively.The two, "Day" and "Night" begin by being surprised, disturbed, distrustful and angry at the differences, escalating towards conflict between them until they accidentally find a way to mutually benefit through cooperation, thus opening up whole new vistas and opportunities only available to them if they work together.In case the visuals you see don't make that point, there's some radio chatter toward the end of the short which makes the point directly and explicitly. It's a lecture, but it's an entertaining lecture.This short is available on DVD as an extra on Toy Story 3 and on the Pixar Shorts Collection 2 and is well worth watching. Most recommended.

I remember seeing this short at the cinema when I saw 'Toy Story 3 (Pixar's best film so far) with one of the support workers (who found the characters cute) from my former care home and it is one of the best Pixar shorts I have ever seen.The character designs were reminiscent of earlier Disney animations and I liked how the 3D animations represented the characters' actions such as a small waterfall to signify Day relieving himself, Night's annoyance of the pool being shut when he stands in front of it and both characters coming together as one when Day's sun sets and Night's sun rises. I also liked the changes of music to match the different actions and how the characters started to get along about halfway through.Overall, this is a visual treat that is every bit as entertaining as the film it preceded. 10/10.

It's a common procedure for Pixar, for a long time now. Everyone of their new films comes preceded by a short animated film. That short film is indicative of whatever issues concern the creative core of the company at those moments. That's why the shorts that preceded Wall.E or Ratatouille dealt with power of the actions, power over creation, fundamentally narratives. The feature films always deepened this theme and added visual concerns. That's why Pixar is important: they've been consistently delivering true cinema wrapped around box office hits. In the process they raised expectations towards animation films and put animation in recognized fields of true cinema.So now we have this Day and Night. Let's read the signs, let's read the urges, let's understand their concerns.They deal with dualities of a great number of different levels, so every visual element in this film works as a metaphor and some of them work as well as a visual experiment.Two characters, both incredibly flat and bi dimensional in a way Disney has been doing them for 80 years. These characters live in a flat black world as well. But within each of them, a 3D world exists. One character is night, the other one is day. At a certain point dawn meets twilight and they change their states. Each character has within them the beautiful things of day and of night, and each one craves the qualities of the other.Can day live with night? Can flat animation meet the requirements of a 3D world. Can Pixar coexist as a surrogate of Disney? These are the questions. What makes me want to keep following whatever Pixar does is that they raise these questions. What frightens me a bit is that they made those questions so obvious here. Are they loosing it? Will they lower their level? My opinion: 3/5 http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com

Pixar is a cinematic laboratory that allows us to see their better experiments and incidentally gets support to continue. They have a long tradition — as long as I can recall — of making short films to play before their expensive features. These shorts focus on some cinematic technique that Pixar wants to push past the state of the art. In every case, that bold experiment in the short is what is used in the feature. It is embedded, not so obvious, but it is there, helping to make the thing fresh. Disney on the other hand is a box office manager. Like the other studios, they care little about the product or even the health of the talent. They want box office receipts and lots of them. If you have been following the story, Pixar gave the rights to Toy Story sequels to Disney as part of the original deal. They ended up making TS2 themselves in defense of what they knew would be dumb. After being bought by Disney, they now have no choice. Elsewhere, you will see that I did not like Toy Story 3. Not at all. There is no advance, no adventure, no dynamism. I think what they wanted to do was play with dimensionality in 3 and had some very clever ideas ready. Think of more, much more of Mr. Potatohead on a taco. So they started on this short. But Disney fell back to what worked the last time, and they are the boss. As bland as TS3 is, this is incredible. I would have paid the full IMAX price just for it. There is a thin sort of story. All Pixar stories are small lessons in life, and this is no different. But the story is insignificant other than showing the harmony of symmetry. We have two beings of course, and two phases of the day. But the real two-ness is the two- dimensional cartoon of Disney fame and the three-dimensional one that Pixar pretty much invented. A great deal about the world in film is different in these two approaches. Can they be married? Can the flat values of Disney be combined with the deeper worlds of Pixar? To judge from this, yes. But to judge from the feature that followed, no.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.