Les Aventures d'André et 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.

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 an extraordinary and historic film, however viewers should not assess this film by the standards of current animation, but rather in its (truly ground-breaking) historical context.

This film is the CG animation equivalent of the first flight of the Wright Brothers (which lasted only 12 seconds). Much like that famous first flight in 1903, this 1984 film paved the way for all that has followed.

It is not the first CG animation ever made, but it is the first to feature a plot, characterization and expression, motion blur, and deformations (eg stretching, squashing). When it was demonstrated at the 1984 SIGGRAPH there was a crowd response bordering on hysteria, as nothing even close to this had ever been done before.

So watch this film with appropriate awe and reverence, for it is the birthing of an entire new art form which we completely take for granted now.

'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

'André And Wally B. (1984)' is a pioneering 3D animation from the people who would go onto become Pixar. It represents a myriad of firsts for the technique and is generally considered to be the first 3D animation with a plot. Needless to say, it's an important movie. However, it isn't really entertaining. The environments all looks surprisingly good but the characters can't match it. Their actual animation is stiff and dull, too. The plot itself is so basic that it's difficult to call it a story, really. Still, these elements can be forgiven if one views the piece in its proper context. It's basically just an experiment. I know that it's brilliant for what it is but it simply doesn't hold up. 5/10