André e Wally B.

This was the next short on Disney plus that I hadn't already reviewed. Certainly, one of the most significant on the app, it's desperately short and desperately dull - but it's all about it's history.

A humanoid character, Andre awakens in a forest and discovers that a bumblebee is in his eyeline. He convinces the Bee, Wally, to look the other way and then makes a run for it. Wally though has other ideas.

I mean, it's not fun. It's over in a couple of minutes and has very little in the way of anything really to entertain you, particularly in comparison to what computer animation is capable of today. But you have to divorce yourself from the present and consider the historical significance of the short. Directed by Alvy Ray Smith and animated by John Lasseter. They would produce the short under the name "The Graphics Group" which at the time was a small sub-division of Lucasfilm. Soon though these same people would form Pixar and become a company in their own right believing firmly in the principles of computer-generated animation and going on to create several beloved masterpieces.

You are effectively trying to review a tech demo, rather than something designed to be genuinely entertaining. You quite simply don't get to "Toy Story 3" without these small, crude looking steps taken decades earlier. It's hard though to recommend you watching it, beyond those interested in cinematic history.

'Andre and Wally B' isn't strictly a true Pixar film (since it was produced mainly at Lucasfilms), but John Lassester was amongst the creative team behind it, and it can still be found on their official Pixar site. A very early venture in making short animated films from CGI, this definitely doesn't rank up there as one of their coolest, perhaps because the limitations are all too obvious. The 3D animation isn't really all that great – the characters look basic and chunky, like they were taken straight from some sort of video game – while the storyline (if you can call it that) is too firmly-welded in the style of classic Walt Disney shorts. This may be done in computer animation, but otherwise it's just the same cartoony mayhem you've seen countless times before, involving a strange character named Andre (you know, I'm not really sure what kind of animal he's meant to be), being chased by a malicious bee. To be fair, I do actually enjoy a lot of the older Walt Disney cartoons, but the traditional 2D animation there had a greater fluidity that the more primitive CGI in this short film, which feels far too awkward and bulky to pull the same style off successfully.

I'm guessing they didn't really have the capacity back then to put together a CGI film with a great deal happening in, so all things considered this isn't bad. It just can't compare to the sort of thing Pixar since went onto achieve, having adopted their own unique style and approach to this medium – their studio's first short, 'Luxo Jr' was an absolute classic.

Grade: C

I gotta admit that if you watch this film today and don't understand the context for it, then you will most likely not be particularly impressed. It's such a very simple animated short and one that seems amazingly ordinary--something you could easily make today given the right rendering software and a home computer. However, think back to 1984. People rarely had home computers and those who did had systems that had major compatibility issues--with not much more power than a modern calculator (less in some cases). There were no hard drives--those that did exist were minuscule. Macintosh computers were yet to come and IBM compatible computers used primitive versions of DOS and many were using Commodore and other simple computers. And, most importantly, most games were either text only or had very, very rudimentary graphics. In this context, ANDRE AND WALLY B is absolutely amazing and breathtaking. The Pixar folks were not yet a big company but just a few individuals doing work on huge computers and they had to design all the software themselves!! And, in spite of all this, the graphics were lovely and the story of a cute bee quite watchable--even though it was really more an experimental film than anything else. Oddly, while this film is not terribly exciting today, I still prefer it to a couple of the later Pixar films (such as RED'S DREAM). A great start.

This is a short from Pixar, their first, I believe. It looks it, too. The animation is good, but there's not much here to speak of and it looks more like test footage than a full, coherent cartoon-a dry run, if you will. They did much better work with later efforts. Not bad, but nothing special here either. Worth seeing.

This is the first short made by the set of people who went on to be Pixar's founders and the company's core creative people. It is much more of proof of concept experimental work than a true story. Indeed, the storyline-such as it is-is a basic scenario and largely exists to allow the filmmakers to test various animation techniques, i.e. 3d models, point blur etc. To that end the film is enjoyable as a piece of history. On its own the short is rather dull and simple-the animation is *exceedingly* dated.

I do like that the short still has the distinctiveness of Pixar.