L'homme-orchestre

Pixar's one man band get cacophonous when two buskers vie to get a gold coin from a little girl. The short story starts with an avuncular busker playing simple music with his trumpet, when he sees that a little girl is about to drop her coin in the fountain, perhaps for a wish. But he manages to lure her with his music and immediately pushes his bowl so that the coin goes into his pocket. Just when the girl reaches to drop the coin into the bowl, another violinist begins to play his instrument. This man is lanky and he plays his instrument mellifluously.

The war begins and the girl gets confused as both the buskers get more and more competitive. The ending is unexpected, and I'm glad Pixar didn't go for an emotional ending. The animation is quite vibrant and detailed for a short film and the humor is subtle. My rating: 7/10

One Man Ban was an absolutely charming piece of work! The colors were vibrant and whimsical and the designs were cute and caricatured. I loved it from the moment it started until the very end! It's surprising it didn't win the Oscar; it was definitely better than the winner. I suppose the judges couldn't justify giving the same crew Oscar after Oscar after Oscar...

The story is about a pair of street performers locked in a competition to out-perform the other and win the golden coin of a little girl passing by. Their musical dueling was delightful and I can't even imagine directing a film where the whole script is music!

10/10

Pixar, at least the preDisney Pixar, uses shorts as experiments. They've used them for new volume computation routines. Remember the birds squooshed together on a telephone line? Remember "Boundin'" which investigated the use of quickly changing space? This one is an amusement of course, they all are. But its reason to be what it is, is the opportunity to explore how characters define space. A problem with the type of 3D animation Pixar does is that the characters become harder. Their skin becomes more of an edge that separates them from their context. Human actors have ways around this. Digital puppets don't have this same possibility.

But they have others, and one of those is to be compound beings. But how to use this so the characters "read" well is unknown. So we have this experiment. As with all Pixar projects, its a triumph. Its more amazing when you know the problem they were solving.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

The short is so wonderful! I can not remember in what movie this short is in, but even now I can still remember the short. The graphics is superb, with great attention to details to the characters and scenery. Kudos Pixar! Even thought he short is very short (thus the term short, d'oh), it is very entertaining. When I watched his short in the cinema, the crowd enjoyed this short very much that the cinema roared with laughter. It almost felt like watching your favorite team scored a goal in a football game.

This is an experiment by Pixar. There are other shorts made by the animation giant like the short about a group of birds sitting on an electric wire, and another short about a bear (or is a penguin? Sorry, can't remember what it is actually) wanting to and find his girlfriend but ended up trapped in the snow globe. Both are two examples of the shorts made. Sorry though, because I forgot both the titles to the shorts I mentioned above.

Unfortunately, the theater's projection screen ruined the animation nuances -- strangely, "Cars" didn't suffer the same way. So this should be better suited to the DVD medium. Think of it as a high-tech nod to Melies.

As for the metaphor, it's a Pixar jab at the big studios. This is a reminder that little Pixar doesn't need frippery to succeed. The competition only offers bells and whistles; Pixar offers core values first. Notice that the 'big guys' don't understand why they haven't won the 'gold coin'.

Sadly, this is the end of Pixar as an uncompromising entity. The Disney deal will probably spell an inexorable slide into mediocrity.