Partly Cloudy – Partly cloudy (2009)

Directed by: Peter Sohn | 6 minutes | animation, comedy, family, short film, fantasy | Original voice cast: Tony Fucile, Lori Richardson

Animated movie buffs always look forward to the latest Pixar Studios movies. Films such as ‘Ratatouille’ (2007) and ‘Wall-E’ (2008) score particularly high in terms of originality and visual ingenuity. The nice thing about Pixar is that with every release they not only launch a one and a half hour long animated film, but also an equally successful short. The movie ‘Up’ (2009) is accompanied by a hilarious short film called ‘Partly Cloudy’ (2009). Central to this is the friendship between a thundercloud and a stork. The five-minute film was directed by Peter Sohn, who worked as a draftsman and story artist on ‘Ratatouille’, ‘The Incredibles’ (2004) and ‘Finding Nemo’ (2003), among others. “While I was working on ‘Up’ I took the plunge and asked if I could pitch ideas for shorts. That was allowed, so I came up with three completely different stories. John Lasseter clearly thought one of the three was the best and I was able to work it out,” said Sohn.

‘Partly Cloudy’ playfully addresses the age-old question of ‘where do babies come from’, in the way we saw earlier in Disney’s classic ‘Dumbo’ (1941). Diligent storks bring those babies around, both in the animal and human world. But where do they get those babies from? According to Peter Sohn from the stratosphere. From tufts of fluffy cloud, friendly big clouds make countless babies every day. Gus is one of those clouds, but he only makes dangerous babies. Small alligators for example, or angry ibex. Because those animals also have babies. Stork Peck is just not very happy with it, because he often gets injured by these not so cute animals. The friendship between Gus and Peck is put to the test by that situation. The story of ‘Partly Cloudy’ is an extension of the main movie ‘Up’, as is the case with all Pixar shorts. The theme of friendship plays a central role in both films and thundercloud Gus, who isolates himself from the other clouds, has many similarities with grumpy ass Carl Fredricksen. Incidentally, director Peter Sohn modeled for the boy scout Russell from ‘Up’!

Like everything that comes out of Pixar, ‘Partly Cloudy’ is also wonderfully made. Sohn and his team have been working on their film for a year and a half and the end result is impressive. Special techniques have been used to give the cloud Gus a woolly texture. In addition, it also had to be partly transparent (as in: ‘foggy’). The figures are drawn quite caricatured, which makes them endearing. Furthermore, the pastel-colored backgrounds have been worked in a beautiful way, using light and shadows. Pixar knows how to entertain its viewers on three levels: not only are the animations beautiful and very ingenious, the films are also full of hilarious fragments. In five minutes you don’t have time for intellectual jokes, but humor at the slapstick level will certainly suffice in this case. The third area on which Pixar hits the nail on the head every time, are the underlying themes, in this case friendship, (mis)communication and jealousy. This gives a minuscule short film a deeper dimension. With ‘Partly Cloudy’ Pixar delivers another impressive business card!