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Pixar Finally Offers Animated Shorts on Pixar.com

Posted by chrisd on from the chess-or-self-hatred dept.

NicerGuy writes "Today I was bored and decided to check out pixar.com. I hadn't been there in a long time, but was pleasantly surprised to find that they have finally made all(?) of their animated shorts available for download. The films, which are in QuickTime format, include my favorites: Geri's Game and Luxo Jr."

5 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cool by Spootnik · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It's pretty amazing. After hearing a lot about it, I caught the short on, of all places, C-SPAN, in the middle of a speech by Steve Jobs, now one of the Pixar mucky-mucks after plucking Apple off the tree.

    It's too bad studios don't attach shorts to features very often--there was that brief run of Roger Rabbit 'toons there for a while, and Disney slips us a Mickey from time to time, but that's about it, innit?

  2. Re:oh yohoo, quicktime by Spootnik · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I performed a search on google and found:

    http://www.appwatch.com/Linux/App/1170/data.html
    http://heroinewarrior.com/quicktime.php3

    These appear to be libraries, not an actual player. I'll search around later, but I suspect if folks are looking for a QuickTime player they may be disappointed.

    Look for a program called 'xanim' for starters. Another app which _might_ have quicktime support is 'xmms'.

  3. Re:I doubt Pixar will turn a profit this year... by Spootnik · · Score: 0, Redundant

    The big studios invest considerable resources into streamlining these to avoid having an hour of every frame just for shipping texture tiles over the network. It's a struggle, even with high-speed lines all in the same building. That's why the idea of trying to ship the data off-site is so ludicrous.

    I'd love to see the back-of-the-envelope calculations for how much bandwidth a real scene would take, how many machines "out there" would have the resources to handle it. If the argument is that you're not talking about studio films or other large projects, but rather small hobby projects, then work backwards from the available bandwidth and resources to deduce exactly what kind of scene might be practical.

  4. Re:Nostalgic by Spootnik · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I'm sure there would be plenty of volunteers for a 'Luxo Jr Restoration Project'... It would have to be a pretty hard task otherwise ;)

    It would be an extremely cool thing to do. Maybe we could rival the IRTC Group Image Project (GIP) with a c.g.r.r. Luxo Jr Restoration Project (LJRP)?

    That said, I still find that the animation in Luxo is rather impressive. Despite lacking the physical "realness" of modern productions, some of it is very nice: like the power lead ripples, and when Jr goes bouncing on the ball for all he's worth... :-) The character expression is really good.

  5. Direct Links to .MOV files by The-Bus · · Score: 0, Redundant
    I never installed a Quicktime plugin, so going to a URL ending in .mov just lets me save the file. These are direct links to the Quicktime files on Pixar's server.

    Pixar Animated Shorts (Direct Links)

    These are the high-quality (320x180) versions... Enjoy.

    --

    Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.