The Mater and the Ghostlight short just came out on the DVD for Cars, so a re-release is hardly exciting. But the first collection of Pixar Shorts had to cut off somewhere, so they might as well go all the way up to Mater.
Pixar Shorts Packaged With Mater and the Ghostlight
"I think they put everybody’s on here," said director Dan Scanlon. "I forget when I heard they were coming out with this. I think it was a couple of months ago. They asked John [Lasseter] and I to come in and do an audio commentary because we hadn’t done one for the actual Cars DVD. So that was really cool to get to sit down and do a commentary with John who’s like the guy that made the shorts that made me want to get into doing the film in the first place, and get into film in the first place. That was really cool. It was very strangely sweet. We recorded a bunch of stuff and just talked for a while and then they edited it all together for the commentary. John heard it and was like, ‘There’s not enough Dan in there. It’s all me.’ He said, ‘Put some more of Dan’s comments back in there.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool.’ He didn’t have to do that so I thought it was pretty neat."
Designed for the Cars DVD as kind of a mini-sequel, Mater was slightly different than the original shorts shown before theatrical Pixar films. "The fun thing about that, especially having spent so much time on Cars, there was just so much stuff that didn’t get in the movie and so to have the opportunity to take it beyond the movie, especially that one that takes place after the movie. It’s almost like this little taste of life after or almost like a little taste of a sequel or something. It was just fun to take it beyond that level. Not to mention we know the characters so well at that point, and the animators and the modelers everybody knows what they’re doing. They’ve got it all down so it just kind of runs like this great machine. Meanwhile we’ve been trying to do the whole movie and struggling to get this working and that. By the time you’re done with the movie you’re like, ‘All right, now we’ve got it figured out.’ It’s cool."
That doesn't mean that it takes any less time to animate. Mater and the Ghostlight still took the standard nine months of most Pixar shorts. "We try to set up limitations to not create a lot of new characters and a lot of new backgrounds just because that’s sort of the assignment. ‘Okay, if you’ve got all this stuff from the movie. Think of something new with it.’ Which is, in some ways, a lot easier than just, ‘You can do anything. Go.’ It’s nice to have that little like, ‘Okay, these are my toys that I can play with.’"
On Blu Ray versions, viewers can see that the short holds up visually to Cars also. "I think mainly just the ratio was slightly different but for the most part it’s designed to still hold up on film. We take it the whole way. We take it to film. We try not to treat it much differently, to treat it as if it could just slip right into the film visually and every other way. I’m glad they’re doing additions to the film on the DVD, doing these shorts based on things from the movie."
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