Lifted

Like always Pixar has created another one of a kind short for all of us to enjoy.

Lifted is set in the quiet/peaceful country side. When a flying saucer appears to abduct a sleeping individual with a tracker beam. unfortunately the tracker beam is operated by an alien trainee who isn't doing too well on his first job. And keeps messing up on the job while the professional alien grades him on his performances.

I won't give away any of the good or funny parts. But it is one of the funniest Pixar shorts yet. The use of no dialog, interesting characters and special effects is all made possible by Pixar. Along with the ever popular films, their shorts are very highly acclaim. And each one makes a further break through in animation or experiment a story that hasn't been made into CGI yet.

You're able to see Lifted along with Ratatouie.

Though I don't remember when it is, L had watched this short movie. Maybe I was a junior high school student. I found this movie was funny when I watched it the first time. Now, I can enjoy watching it enough. In the movie, at first, a swing shakes by itself. I thought "Is this movie a horror movie?" at first. However, it is wrong. This movie is comedy. It is presented by Pixar. The whole movie is made by 3D animation and characters are so cute and attractive. They are very friendly. And the story is humorous. There are many comical scenes in only 5 minutes. i didn't get tried of it. It is a quintessential Pixar movie. Also, what I think funny is the last scene. I think, usually, in a movie, animation and TV program, the credit roll runs at the end of the movie when all programs finish. However, in this movie, credit roll is used effectively as part of the story. It is my favorite point of this movie.

A sleeping human rests on his bed when a gigantic UFO appears and, hell-bent on it, attempts to take him away.

The animation sets the scene as something mysterious, something that the spectator is expecting to see in an UFO movie, which later on adds to the humorisity of it all when the alien keeps on trying to take the human away without success, making the viewer realise that this isn't a normal short.

There's no dialogue, but the visual storytelling (the expressions of the aliens, the circumstances in which the youn alien is in) is so great that it isn't needed. The constant mistakes of the alien and the absolute blank-face of his partner are hilarious, but the story has time to turn a little heartwarming before making the audience laugh again. The ending is truly the cherry on top of this humorous short.

This is another fun little short in the tradition of fun little shorts from Pixar. Soundman extraordinaire Gary Rydstrom directs for the first time (according to IMDb), and the result is solid.

Not surprisingly, the sound for this short is fantastic, opening with some isolated nighttime noises of a country farmhouse. I've spent a fair amount of time on the real life equivalent of this digital set and this part sounded realistic to me.

By the way, I wrote this whole mini-review just so I could finish with this: Aieeeeeeeeee!

See Gary, the audience really IS listening.

Lifted (2006)

*** (out of 4)

Extremely entertaining and rather intelligent short from Pixar has a couple aliens landing their aircraft above a house where they try to beam up the man sleeping inside. The only problem is that the smallest alien is having trouble with all the controls and can't get him up to the ship. This short is certainly very high on the cute level as the two aliens look the part just right and the overall comedy never gets too high but instead just delivers a fun time. I thought the alien was the amazing looking shots of the UFO outside the out. I loved the way it looked with that incredibly bright light and I really loved the ending and what the ship looked like when it took off. I thought the two aliens looked very good and their comic timing together got plenty of nice, if small laughs. On the visual level this here is certainly one of the best looking shorts I've seen from the studio.