La Luna and Paperman

Since I follow Enrico Casarosa on Twitter, I’ve been hearing about La Luna for what seems like a year. I was so happy to finally see the film run in front of Brave last weekend. Beautifully done and possibly my favorite Pixar short, perfect for a short film. (As an added bonus for seeing it at Alamo Drafthouse, they ran 7 other Pixar shorts before the feature started.)

There’s so much interesting work possible with short films. Disney apparently has another great one up their sleeves in Paperman. Some of the early hype:

"From what they told me and from what I've glimpsed in these concept drawings and videos below, it could be a game-changer for hand-drawn animation. In fact, it's a new holistic hybrid of 2D and 3D, thanks to an interface called Meander that they 'hijacked' for the project from a young Disney programmer named Brian Whited, which was then refined by animator Eric Daniels and others. It's a vector-based tool that empowers the animator with digital in-betweening and puts the drawings back on the screen."

Also check out the series of YouTube teasers from the director: the idea and the look. And the first still shots from the film.

This kind of has why am I still programming written all over it for me.

Manton Reece @manton