Pixar Popcorn

Some of these shorts are quite fun but most of these are quite bland and the lack of voices are really noticeable. The Soul one was particularly bad since it was literally trailer shots reused for the short. The Incredibles ones & the 2nd Ducky/Bunny one are particularly great.

With new shorts series like Disney's Short Circuit and Pixar's own SparkShorts, it is refreshing to see these studios freed of the weight of their franchises to experiment both narratively and visually.

In Popcorn we see Pixar experiment once more with even shorter shorts and this time with the tricky proposition of playing within their best-known franchises. Not a studio to shy away from a challenge, it is very welcome to see that they are not content with telling stories in too straightforward a manner.

A majority of these shorts are dialogue-free, which is a great surprise. Wall-E showed that Pixar can work with silence, and that is cemented with the Popcorn shorts. Most of them are quite nice small scenes and gags.

Of these my favorites were the domesticity of the Incredibles ones, the silent comedy of the Coco one and the chill of the Soul one. This Soul short might be the most surprising one in its reflective atmosphere, tying to other left-field Disney+ projects like Zenimation and the Disney Park Sunrises.

When I first heard that Pixar would release some new shorts, I was expecting something along the lines of the five-minute shorts they usually produce. I was disappointed to find out that these are microscopic skits that don't really add anything to the original films. "Popcorn" is not a good title; perhaps "leftover crumbs" would be more accurate. My favourite was the Incredibles doing their chores with their powers. But even at its best, I feel that Pixar's labour would still be better spent just producing more great films instead of these harmless but pointless diversions.

These short films are decently cute and fun but completely pointless. Nearly zero dialogue. The ducky and bunny episodes are the only ones with actual talking. I was looking forward to these but pretty underwhelmed. Something seems off or different with the animation as well. It's not terrible or unwatchable, but noticeably different than the quality from the respective movies. I'd say if you're a hardcore Pixar fan they're still worth a quick watch. You can watch all of them in about twenty minutes. But don't expect them to add anything meaningful to the story or any character development. They're okay for what they are.

Given these shorts are all only about two minutes long this is harmless enough project but you do keep asking yourself what the point is. The animation is of course excellent but the lack of voices on a couple of them is a real shame and a few seem like deleted scenes from the parent movie that were rightly excised.

For me the most interesting part was the popcorn themed variations on the Luxo Jr. opening logo.