Quite apart from their exquisitely-rendered, emotionally-touching movies, Pixar has also shown itself adept at crafting memorable animated shorts that often say as much in 5 to 8 minutes as their longer brethren.
Far from being the unwanted support act to the latest Pixar feature-length masterpiece, the shorts such as For the Birds (Monsters, Inc), Lava (Inside Out) and Presto (WALL-E) have received rapturous attention and much devotion from fans who see the shorts as an integral part of going to see a Pixar film.
To this long and much-loved list, you can now add Sanjay’s Super Team, which will be the lead-in to the upcoming film The Good Dinosaur, premiering later this year.
As Screenrant observes, this short, of which we only have the briefest of clips along with some stunning concept art, is remarkable in a number of ways:
“Despite having over 25 years of animated films behind them, Sanjay’s Super Team hits a few firsts for the studio. It is the first Pixar film to center around Hindu culture and the first by a director of Indian descent. [The short] is also Sanjay Patel’s directorial debut. Patel joined Pixar in 1996 as an animator on A Bug’s Life, and has worked on several films since, including Toy Story 3, Monsters, Inc. and The Incredibles.”
Patel admitted to Yahoo! Movies recently that the film is partly autobiographical, with the short film kicking off in the bland room of a motel, based on the one owned and operated by his family, before Sanjay’s imagination goes into overdrive and his world is filled with a glorious riot of colour.
It also addresses the back and forth between Patel, who admits his god was TV growing up and his devout Hindu father, who didn’t always see eye-to-eye on the important things in life.
And it is brilliantly, beautifully colourful, a tribute by Patel to a life filled with colour, imaginative possibility.
We may have the one clip to judge the short by at this stage, but it was shown in full at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con and it left the audience “swooning” according to Screenrant.
And speaking of The Good Dinosaur, and Pixar in general, the animation powerhouse has released a touching tribute video to 20 years of beautiful, touching, lifechanging animation.