The Adventures of André and Wally B. (1984)

Directed by: John Lasseter | 1.45 minutes | animation, short film

“The Adventures of André and Wally B.” is mainly important from a film-historical point of view. It is the first film that the later Pixar team, led by John Lasseter, made as a group, experimenting for the first time with basic animation elements in 3D animation, which was still in its infancy at the time. On the one hand it is fascinating to see what the first steps in the field of 3D animation looked like, and on the other hand to see the first work of the people behind the now well-known and very successful studio. But that’s where the value of this video ends. The movie is very short, and the story hardly contains an original idea, nor a humorous punch line. It’s a good fingering exercise for the technicians, but without real content power or much focus on entertainment value.

The Pixar group was still working at Lucasfilm, where the guys were part of the computer department, and the reason they wanted to make this film was to be able to animate a character in 3D and to experiment with techniques like motion blur. Originally the intention was to make the central character an android but this was abandoned because the animators wanted more flexibility in the body for the pantomime “acting”. So they abandoned the pure geometric shapes to which they were limited as cones and cylinders, and made André’s body in the shape of a teardrop. The body was animated as if it were a water balloon, causing movement as the character sprinted past. The motion blur that emerged and was revolutionary in 3D animation sometimes caused the computer to go crazy, the makers say in the audio commentary of the collected DVD of Pixar’s short films.

They were important developments in the field of (3D) computer animation and the decisions in this film have been decisive or even decisive for the later success of the studio. It’s interesting to learn about this, but as a movie itself, “The Adventures of André and Wally B” isn’t very successful. André, who sounds like Donald Duck, wakes up in a forest and is bullied by a curious bee. Then André points in another direction, where Wally the bee immediately flies to – for reasons that are unclear – allowing André to quickly flee in the other direction. When Wally sees the ruse, he follows him furiously, trying to get him with his sting. However, he returns with a bent sting. The latter is probably a remnant of the idea that Andre ([A]ndroid?) was supposed to be a robot, and would have been a nice story element in that case, but now there’s little funny about it. The inventiveness of the stories of Pixar’s films and the emotions they managed to instill in their characters, better and better, are still hard to find here. It’s not an annoying movie, and it’s over before you know it, but it’s too insignificant to make any impression, other than the then crude, primitive animation style, which was innovative in the context of the time. Pixar also had to start small and unpretentious.