The Adventures of André and Wally B.

• First use of motion blur in computer animation.
• First use of squash-and-stretch motion in computer animation.
• The modeling program used at the time could only produce simple geometric designs (cones, cubes, spheres). John Lasseter wanted a flexible pear shape for the characters’ bodies, as is found in most cartoon characters. Eventually a teardrop shape was achieved by stretching the point of a sphere to infinity.
• John Lasseter made this film to entertain his children; ironically, it frightened them instead.

2) This is a short from Pixar, their first, I believe. It looks it, too. Theanimation is good, but there’s not much here to speak of and it looks morelike test footage than a full, coherent cartoon-a dry run, if you will.They did much better work with later efforts. Not bad, but nothingspecialhere either. Worth seeing.

3) From 1984, this short film was the first work that John Lasseter, EbenOstby and Bill Reeves made as a team but it was made when they stillwere part of Lucasfilm. Basically is just the beginning of all soeverything is quite limited. With only one and half minute this shortfilm can't be more than just the very important and fantastic beginningof something. Is great to hear the commentary of the Blu-ray and now isfun to hear the fact that Lasseter and pals could only made geometricdesigns with their program. Still the could create two nice charactersthat are the protagonist of a "one joke" story and with that they couldnot only show a project that was new in matters of technology but atthe same time they could put to it soul, they made that theircolleagues didn't care about the fact that when the short was showed,in a very known event by them, was not even finished. It was somethingnew, something different.

This is the kind of stuff that if -TODAY- you are going to show to yourgirlfriend, for example, and she doesn't really know about it youreally have to explain her everything behind it, make sure that shewill not judge it just for how the animation looks or how funny was thestory, make sure that she appreciate everything behind because andafter all it is just a must-see important piece of work and for me itwas absolutely great to finally watch it.

4) This is the first and earliest Pixar short. It’s also the oldest CGIshort I know so far. It’s only about 2 minutes long and the theme issimilar to a Chuck Jones or Looney Tunes short. Only has 2 charactersone who is Andre a Greenish Runner and Wally B. a Bee with 4 feet.

The animation is not bad for a CGI short from 1984. And this is madeway before Pixar became well known. The 2 main and only characters aresomewhat cartoony but very memorable. It’s only 2 minutes long, butit’s worth watching. You’re able to see it at Pixar’s official webpage.

After you see I bet you just wish they made more shorts about Andre andWally B.

Every Animation studio has it’s own start and this is Pixar’s start tofame and glory.

i give this one 7/10. Very good for a 2 minute short.

5) ‘Andre and Wally B’ isn’t strictly a true Pixar film (since it wasproduced mainly at Lucasfilms), but John Lassester was amongst thecreative team behind it, and it can still be found on their officialPixar site. A very early venture in making short animated films fromCGI, this definitely doesn’t rank up there as one of their coolest,perhaps because the limitations are all too obvious. The 3D animationisn’t really all that great – the characters look basic and chunky,like they were taken straight from some sort of video game – while thestoryline (if you can call it that) is too firmly-welded in the styleof classic Walt Disney shorts. This may be done in computer animation,but otherwise it’s just the same cartoony mayhem you’ve seen countlesstimes before, involving a strange character named Andre (you know, I’mnot really sure what kind of animal he’s meant to be), being chased bya malicious bee. To be fair, I do actually enjoy a lot of the olderWalt Disney cartoons, but the traditional 2D animation there had agreater fluidity that the more primitive CGI in this short film, whichfeels far too awkward and bulky to pull the same style offsuccessfully.

I’m guessing they didn’t really have the capacity back then to puttogether a CGI film with a great deal happening in, so all thingsconsidered this isn’t bad. It just can’t compare to the sort of thingPixar since went onto achieve, having adopted their own unique styleand approach to this medium – their studio’s first short, ‘Luxo Jr’ wasan absolute classic.

Grade: C