Day & Night

This delivers everything we expect from a Pixar short. It's clever, funny, interesting, with solid sound work, great music and the animation is amazing. The lighting and use of color are incredible, and crucial to making the concept work. This is quite creative. Basically night and day are actual living beings that grow jealous of each other's experiences. This leads to a conflict.

There is not a single word spoken here. Every time something needs to be expressed, it's either only visually or there is the sound of something that is happening during one of these two time periods, corresponding to what we're seeing and how they feel about it. I love the idea of introducing children to, for the mainstream, such unusual storytelling. Recommended. 8/10.

Really well-made film. From the animation style, I guess it's strictly for kids, although everyone can enjoy it. The unique colour combinations make it very interesting. It's very original, and that's the best thing of all. But it's a kind of short which I appreciate but can't say I loved. Probably because it didn't make me feel anything, nor it's funny.

While other animation studios these days concentrate on features, Pixar likes to remember that it is a cartoon factory and continues to precede each theatrical feature with a short subject. DAY AND NIGHT, the latest, was released along with Pixar's TOY STORY THREE.

While Pixar's features -- and those of its competitors' -- become ever more sophisticated in their uses of computer animation to facilitate their stories, their short subjects have been becoming more cartoony. Their last short, PRESTO, recalled Tex Avery. This one suggests the sort of loose animation style favored by UPA, as one cloudy mass containing daylight scenes bumps into another cloudy mass containing night time scenes. The clouds' outlines are vague, populated by the highly detailed visions one expects of Pixar; but while the interiors show their natures, it is the vague outlines that carry the story -- and their characters.

Fpr a student of animation, it is a typical Pixar delight. Thanks for keeping the short movie cartoon alive, guys.

I have always liked or loved Pixar's films, and I thought now was a good time to revisit their short films. And I am so glad I did. Day and Night(which I did remember as the short before Toy Story 3) is a gem, even if I would personally put the likes of Presto, Knick Knack, One Man Band and Geri's Game over it. The animation is beautiful with some unique shades and colouring and the detailed backgrounds you would expect, and the music is great with the use of Rossini's William Tell. The story, if not as clear as other Pixar short films, tells so much in 6 minutes and has a thought-provoking message(however different we may be, we are all one and the same) to it of the dangers of racism and tolerance. The humour even without dialogue is smart and somewhat edgy, which I liked. The personifications of daytime and nighttime are very well done and easy to root for, I loved the end especially where night and day became twilight. Overall, if you love Pixar, you'll love this. 9/10 Bethany Cox

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.