Until now, any fans of the Pixar short films would have to pop in a different DVD every time they wanted to watch one. Now the first 13 are collected in one volume. Andrew Jimenez's One Man Band, which debuted in front of Cars theatrically, is part of the collection.
Pixar Shorts Packaged With One Man Band
"Mark Andrews and I were still working on The Incredibles and kind of knee deep in it," recalled Jimenez. "We had this meeting with Ed Capmull. Ed said he wanted us to come up with three short film ideas. There was nothing beyond that, no promise beyond that. So we were so excited, but then that excitement turned into almost complete terror because the thing that Pixar values the most, their mantra is, ‘Story, story, story.’ Also I think that for everybody happens to be the hardest thing to do. The hardest thing is just to come up with an original good story with believable characters. There’s no math to it or science to it. You can’t just say, ‘Go!’ and think of an idea. If we didn’t come up with anything it would have just died right there."
The idea for One Man Band was one in 100. "We had an idea book, this book that had something like a hundred ideas in it by the end of this. We narrowed it down to two we liked, but we needed one more. One idea that kept our theme, that kept coming up was an idea about music but we didn’t have a good idea or good characters to put that in. We just really wanted to tell something with music. I’m a big film score buff. Since I was six I’ve always been listening to film scores as kind of my main source of inspiration for ideas and coming up with stuff. I loved the idea of trying to come up with a film where music wasn’t just the underscore and the thing that was meant to enhance the story or the characters. Where music really was the story and the characters voices."
The key into that musical story turned out to be one of their other, almost discarded ideas. "We had another story that had nothing to do with music but it did have a theme of two people and competition, and what people’s personalities do with competition. Where, ‘I think I’m pretty good at something but no one’s here to challenge me,’ so it’s a very natural human instinct to get a little lazy when you don’t have to try. Then somebody else comes along who’s really, really good at that thing, and then how does that first person respond? Do they collaborate with that person and learn from them? Or do they feel threatened by them and want to outdo them? That’s where the light bulb for One Man Band went off was we can take this idea about music and tell it in the form of this story about competition. So that’s kind of these dueling one man bands. They were bored."
If development took that long, imagine what putting the five minutes of animation together took. "If you do the math it doesn’t quite work out. An 80 minute Pixar feature can take four and a half years to make. And then One Man Band took shy of a year. So four minutes a year, 80 minutes three more years, you know? But a lot of resources go into it."
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