Progress City, U.S.A.

Good news, everyone! The truly excellent new Pixar short Day & Night has just been released on iTunes. If you haven’t seen Toy Story 3 yet, or even if you have, it’s well worth checking out. In fact, at the moment I think it might be my favorite Pixar short ever – I enjoyed it far more than Toy Story 3 itself, as a matter of fact. It’s certainly different, and draws on some unique styles and techniques to do something refreshing and new. It also has some nice midcentury traditional animation influences, so that’s fun. Anyway, that’s my spiel – head over to iTunes to check it out yourself.

To celebrate the DVD release of UP, Pixar recently released a short animatic film on their Facebook page. The short, George & A.J., was written and directed by Josh Cooley; despite its story-sketch approach it’s quite hilarious. In fact, it winds up being a funnier short than the more polished Dug’s Special Mission from the DVD. While I wouldn’t pass up extra Dug for anything in the world, I am disappointed that this great little short didn’t make it on the DVD or Blu-Ray release. In any case, you can see it now for free online!

What’s all this then?

Nice logo, by the way.

Looky – new art:

The site features new unseen development art from The Princess and the Frog…

…and the upcoming short Glago’s Guest

While Disney Feature Animation has been eager to trumpet its new shorts program by occasionally giving us peeks at its upcoming slate, Pixar has been less forthcoming about the projects in its pipeline. With the release of WALL-E growing ever closer, Jerry Beck has given us a glimpse at what will accompany that film to theaters. Presto, directed by Doug Sweetland, is the name of the new short and all I know about it is what can be divined by the still above, which Beck scanned from a flier for the Hiroshima International Animation Festival. What can I say? I’m sold already. The short is Sweetland’s directorial debut; he formerly served at Pixar as a supervising animator. Just one more reason why June 27th can’t come soon enough…

I’ve been trying to find a copy of the 2004 animated short Lorenzo for quite a while. The film appeared in of theaters in front of the film Raising Helen which, oddly enough, I didn’t manage to catch. Anyway, from the look of the Google searches people use to find my page, a lot of other people are looking for Lorenzo too. So here’s a question for all you good people – is there anywhere online that one can see this piece of work? Any copies floating around out in the aether?