What's old is new again. The Walt Disney studio is reviving its old practice of creating shorts that will screen in theaters before movies—Disney movies, naturally. Each short will be hand-drawn, CG or (as many are these days) somewhere between the two. I'm happy to note that one of the earliest announced projects is a revival of the old Goofy "How to" shorts.

The idea for this project comes from John Lasseter, and the intent is to use the shorts as a training ground for animators and a testing ground for new ideas—basically, the same thing that Walt did so many decades ago.

If you think about it, though, this practice of shorts-as-proving grounds never really disappeared. (Heck, Pixar themselves have been practitioners since 1986's André and Wally B.) Independent animators and studios have refined their craft (and their reputations) through short films for quite some time. There's sort of a hierarchy to it, starting with the independent animator at the bottom, then independent studios, then commercials, then feature films. One uses shorts to get from a lower rung to a higher one, or, more indirectly, shorts open up the field to new ideas which are then gratefully used by bigger studios and more commercial productions.

What makes this new is that it's a major movie studio making this effort; Cartoon Network's UK program notwithstanding, no one has made a serious go at this sort of thing since Warner Bros. a few years back. (That little plan might have been derailed because of bad placement. If memory serves, the shorts were generally screened along with the kind of kids' films that parents either tried to avoid or, once in the theater, tried to ignore. Or, as in the case of Pullet Surprise and Cats Don't Dance, they were paired with films that Warner publicity largely ignored.) The problem is that shorts cost money to make, and in an environment where studios and theater owners want to maximize the number of times a movie can be repeated daily, shorts aren't exactly big earners. But what Lasseter recognizes, likely from his own experience, is that shorts, like any company's R&D, are really a long-term investment—and Disney, of all companies, can afford to experiment. Let's hope it sticks this time.

Labels: Disney

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