Following the success of Toy Story it was decided to continue this tradition as a way of promoting R&D, developing in-house talent (and retaining it in-between feature film productions), and experimenting with ideas and techniques without committing to a full-length feature. In its early days these short films promoted the work of the fledgling company, becoming an integral part of Pixar’s development as a film studio. Pixar began making short films as a way to explore and advance technology with the goal of producing a completely computer-animated feature-length film. An understanding of these key developments, which can be traced through Pixar’s short film history, is essential in order to contextualise the aesthetic choices made for La Luna. By juxtaposing digital methods with an analogue aesthetic, Pixar not only highlights a preference for a more traditional look, but also underlines the technological advancements that have enabled CG animation to achieve a more organic image. The film employs hand-drawn art and watercolour backgrounds to challenge the sleek contemporary appearance of mainstream animation. The film, which was released theatrically alongside Brave (Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, 2012), is a coming-of-age tale about a young boy who joins his father and grandfather for the first time as they reveal their family’s unusual line of work-clearing fallen stars from the moon. La Luna, in particular, marks a pivotal shift within Pixar’s short film canon by demonstrating an organic aesthetic through textures that appear manmade and flawed. The shorts that have been produced by the studio since the late 1980s have enabled Pixar to develop ideas and advance technical capabilities. Pixar’s cutting-edge approach emerges in particular from its long-standing tradition of short films, which form the basis for the studio’s research and development. Finally, this article will examine how the convergence of 2D and CG animation techniques represents and encapsulates the creative partnership and collaboration between Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. The first section of the article will outline the significant technological developments that have facilitated the emergence of an organic aesthetic within digital animation, while the second section will consider how nostalgia informs a common preference for a more traditional look. In order to engage with these recent developments, this article will explore the aesthetic and methods employed in Pixar’s short films, also drawing comparisons between La Luna and Paperman, and Day & Night and Get a Horse!. Pixar has pushed the boundaries of computer-generated animation to create digital images that resemble hand-drawn artwork, highlighting a nostalgic trend for the analogue, which, as will be demonstrated later, broadly characterises contemporary media. This article will argue that the organic aesthetic embraced in these short films has in turn influenced the style of Walt Disney Animation’s Paperman (John Kahrs, 2012) and Get a Horse! (Lauren MacMullan, 2013). The emergence of a more organic aesthetic is most evident in Pixar’s short films Day & Night (Teddy Newton, 2010) and La Luna (Enrico Casarosa, 2011). I will be using the term “organic aesthetic” to describe a tendency that has recently emerged in digital animation and that relates not just to what is hand drawn, but also to a look that is altogether non-artificial, analogue and nostalgic. We are familiar with the use of the term “organic” pertaining not only to the body, but also in relation to all that is more natural and less artificial. While Colleen Montgomery argues that the technology pioneered by Pixar has “displaced hand-drawn traditions in mainstream American animation” (8), we are now witnessing Pixar’s experimentation with traditional 2D animation techniques and with textures that are organic and imperfect. Not only has the technology developed by Pixar become an industry standard for filmmaking, but the studio’s aesthetic style epitomises contemporary mainstream animation. The phenomenal success of Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), the world’s first fully computer-generated animated feature film, saw the “widespread popularization of 3D computer animation technologies in both animated and live action cinema” (Montgomery 7). Pixar Animation Studios has been at the forefront of cutting-edge digital animation for over twenty-five years. To Infinity and Back Again: Hand-drawn Aesthetic and Affection for the Past in Pixar’s Pioneering Animation Helen Haswell
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