Day & Night (2010)

What a beautiful movie!

A lot of fun.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Creativity is the core key to stand out in today's world. Pixar knows that. Ideas are flourishing from it and they come into existence like bold and strong animations that take your breath away. I think this movie just tries to say to us that we should find our true friends and never leave them, cause they're our "day & night"

This may also be the question that the Academy asked themselves when they picked Australian entry "The Lost Thing" over Pixar's "Day & Night" for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short that year. On the technical level, it really doesn't get much better than "Day & Night". The animation is brilliant, it's fast, it's witty and it oozes creativity. But I just felt it wasn't emotional at all and even the scenes where Day and Night were sad or happy about what they (not) experienced weren't really emotionally investing like previous Pixar short films, such as the very early "Red's Dream". It just lacks almost completely the charm that Toy Story 3, the film with which it was shown together in theaters, was so full of.Nonetheless, it's a pretty interesting take on life (or lack thereof) during day and night and the two protagonists, after initial disdain, quickly get curious about what happens during the other's time of the day. This includes casinos, butterflies, attractive women, fireflies, fireworks and many more. Finally they manage to find a way to see each other's marvels and the fusion sequence is quite a thing of beauty. A must-watch for animation lovers and an entertaining six minutes for everybody else too.

I've been a huge fan of Teddy Newton since I saw his amazing collages on the "Incredibles" special features. I'm a mixed-media/collage artist myself, and I wanted to hang his art on my wall with spotlights and background music. :) He's incredibly talented, and I'm thrilled that he got to direct a short.The concept and the characters were absolutely precious. However, do we HAVE to have another movie/cartoon/kids show about the virtues of tolerance and understanding? I can't keep PBS Kids on the TV without my kids being spoon-fed "tolerance" in 100 different ways. It's apparently one of the highest virtues possible, other than caring for the environment. /sarc.Plus, a lesson on the evils of preconceived notions just feels like cheesy story-telling. I remember on the commentary for "One Man Band," the directors said (in essence), "We thought about having the two work together at the end, but we found out that working together just isn't very *funny.*" If story is built on conflict, and yet your story tries to teach us that conflict could be avoided with just a little more understanding, it stops being a story! It starts being a sermon. (Side note: The reason why I hate Christian movies is because they're 99% sermons, and sacrifice story on the altar of persuasion. I really hope Pixar doesn't take that route in the secular world.) I hope Teddy Newton directs again soon. I love his work. I just don't like being preached at.

Pixar is a cinematic laboratory that allows us to see their better experiments and incidentally gets support to continue. They have a long tradition — as long as I can recall — of making short films to play before their expensive features. These shorts focus on some cinematic technique that Pixar wants to push past the state of the art. In every case, that bold experiment in the short is what is used in the feature. It is embedded, not so obvious, but it is there, helping to make the thing fresh. Disney on the other hand is a box office manager. Like the other studios, they care little about the product or even the health of the talent. They want box office receipts and lots of them. If you have been following the story, Pixar gave the rights to Toy Story sequels to Disney as part of the original deal. They ended up making TS2 themselves in defense of what they knew would be dumb. After being bought by Disney, they now have no choice. Elsewhere, you will see that I did not like Toy Story 3. Not at all. There is no advance, no adventure, no dynamism. I think what they wanted to do was play with dimensionality in 3 and had some very clever ideas ready. Think of more, much more of Mr. Potatohead on a taco. So they started on this short. But Disney fell back to what worked the last time, and they are the boss. As bland as TS3 is, this is incredible. I would have paid the full IMAX price just for it. There is a thin sort of story. All Pixar stories are small lessons in life, and this is no different. But the story is insignificant other than showing the harmony of symmetry. We have two beings of course, and two phases of the day. But the real two-ness is the two- dimensional cartoon of Disney fame and the three-dimensional one that Pixar pretty much invented. A great deal about the world in film is different in these two approaches. Can they be married? Can the flat values of Disney be combined with the deeper worlds of Pixar? To judge from this, yes. But to judge from the feature that followed, no.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.