Salute their shorts
Thursday, November 29th, 2007
Recently, Disney announced that their new Goofy-starring short How To Hook Up Your Home Theater would be released to theaters on December 21st in front of the new film National Treasure: Book of Secrets. This was a surprise to fans, as most everyone had assumed it would be released a month earlier attached to the more animation-appropriate Enchanted. Instead, Disney is choosing to premiere the first release from its new shorts program in front of a live-action adventure film, an act of counter-programming that shows their faith in the product and the desire to reach a larger market with these new shorts than the already animation-friendly family market.
How To Hook Up Your Home Theater is not the first animated short from Disney in recent years; Destino, Lorenzo, and The Little Match Girl were all produced as part of a failed Fantasia sequel and were released on the festival circuit. Still, they weren’t released to a wide audience – only Lorenzo played in theaters (inexplicably, in front of the film Raising Helen) and two of the three aren’t currently available to the public (trust me – I’ve tried to find a copy of Lorenzo to watch!). How To Hook Up Your Home Theater differs from these earlier efforts in that it is part of a program initiated when John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and their Pixar crew came to Disney a few years ago; a official shorts division is now set up and operating under the control of veteran story artist Chuck Williams.
Pixar is well known for its short films – Lasseter and company spent a decade working only on shorts before they released Toy Story in 1995, and nowadays every Pixar release is accompanied by a new short. Lasseter and Catmull had the clout to help revive a similar program at Walt Disney Feature Animation, and we’re now starting to enjoy the fruits of their labors. The benefits of a shorts program are manifold; they are a valuable training tool for new animators, they help to develop and discover new talent, they allow experimentation, and they push innovation. Shorts also provide an outlet for ideas that deserve realization, but aren’t hefty enough on their own to hold up an entire feature film.
The Disney Studios were built on the success of Mickey Mouse shorts in the 1920’s and 30’s, but after the war the profits on shorts began to dry up and they became a drain on resources. Despite several attempts to revive the animated short over the years, they never seemed to be a natural fit in the modern theater industry. Nowadays, however, with digital distribution and new media, there are more outlets for short films than ever. Studios are always looking for new and inexpensive content to add to DVD’s, and Pixar has successfully produced new shorts for their home video products as a value-added inducement to consumers. Shorts are easily shared online, and it’s much more likely that a person would download a few inexpensive shorts onto their ipod for a crosstown bus ride than an entire feature. Shorts are a rarity – an archaic form of media that might just fit perfectly into our attention-span-deprived modern world.
Taking all of this into account, and combining it with a sheer nostalgic love of the Disney animated short, Lasseter, Catmull and the new management at WDAS are setting out to create a steady stream of new shorts for the upcoming years (at the time of this writing, aside from the Goofy short, five more are said to have been approved with three in actual production). Lasseter has specifically indicated a desire to revive Disney’s classic stable of characters, and it’s worth noting that several of the films are in traditional 2-D animation. Let’s take a look at what they have in store:
