Pictures on the Fly

Now that 2015 has come and gone, looking back, a lot of film fans have noticed that the majority of movies this past year have been pulling on their nostalgia strings. Bringing back popular nostalgic franchises such as; Mad Max , Jurassic Park , Terminator , and finally Star Wars . With the return of these franchises, as nice as it is to see new takes on these properties, the responses have been very split down the middle. Some have been phenomenally praised by fans and critics, others have been mercilessly panned by the latter. With that said, it's safe to say that 2015 has been an eventful year for movies. Over the years, I've asked myself, and others, something that always gets me when regarding movies like these, "Why now?" The majority of these movies debuted decades ago. Some long before we were born, depending on what generation we're talking about. But why do filmmakers insist on either continuing stories that ended on a pretty conclusive note at the en...

Since the early 1980s, Pixar Animation Studios had made a number of short films. Most of them consisted of bringing inanimate objects to life, as the central characters. That is until 1998, when "A Bug's Life" had been theatrically released in theaters, with the Pixar Short "Geri's Game." Not only was Geri's Game the very first Pixar short to be released theatrically attached to a feature film, but it was also the studio's first short film revolving around a human character. The story of Geri's Game, is probably one of the most simplest of stories for a short film. An elderly man, Geri, sits in a chess park, in Autumn. He sets up his chess board, with all pieces perfectly alined. He sits down and makes the first move on the white side, happily and gently, and waits patiently for his opponent to make the next move. We find out that Geri is sitting in the park, playing chess, by himself. He slowly gets up and walks over to the other side, takes ...

From the late 1920s through the 1930s and 40s, the Walt Disney film company had made a series of animated shorts shown in movie theaters known as, "Silly Symphonies." Silly Symphonies were either original short stories the animators created or adaptations of children's fairy tales. Earlier on in the series, the characters in the Silly Symphonies didn't have dialogue written. Instead, the creators used originally scored music and sound effects, both made in the Disney studios. Each episode would begin with a series of title cards, beginning with the words, "Walt Disney presents, a Silly Symphony," with a bright red felt-like material in the background. It's been years since classic Disney fans have seen any kind of short film with a similar opening title sequence, until the summer of 2008, when fans went to go see Disney and Pixar's Wall-E in theaters. The title sequence belonged to the Pixar Short presented before Wall-E, "Presto." The t...

Every time a new Disney/Pixar film coms out, I always think to myself. "What are the short films going to be like?" Since, "A Bug's Life," feature length Pixar films have presented short films (Pixar Shorts) before the actual film began. Some of the shorts like, Knick Knack and Luxo Jr. were the first films the PIxar team had made during the 80's. Other like Geri's Game, For the Birds, and many others were short films they were making the same time as the feature films. The latest Pixar short, presented before the newest Pixar film, "Brave," is called "La Luna." La Luna has a very simple premiss to the story, yet a very larger then life scale and atmosphere in the form of a children's bed time story. The story of La Luna, revolves around three characters; a little boy (Bambino), his father (Papa), and his grandfather (Nonno). Papa and Nonno take Bambino along with them to the middle of the ocean, under a clear starry night, wi...

In my analysis on La Luna, I mentioned that there are other short films before feature length Pixar films. Besides La Luna, Day and Night, is my other favorite Pixar short. Day and Night was presented before the official showing of Toy Story 3, just as La Luna was presented before Brave. Both shorts have decent stories, for short films, and send good messages to both children and adults. But unlike La Luna, Day and Night's visual design gambles more with it's innovation. Making the two central characters hand drawn animated externally and their thoughts and feelings described through environmental imagery as well as simple sound effects, was a brilliant work of genius. The film as a whole, is effective both visually and philosophically. Like La Luna, the story of Day and Night is very simple; One of the main characters, Day, wakes up on a beautiful summer morning and begins his morning stroll. He deviates from his stroll when he finds a sleeping Night, dreaming of jumping sh...