Film Preview: Partly Cloudy

Posted in Film, Previews
By Sam Bathe on 20 May 2009

Only from Pixar would you be almost as excited about an accompanying short animated film as a main feature. To be attached to the highly anticipated Up, Partly Cloudy will air just before the opening credits of Carl Fredricksen’s balloon-packed adventure, and takes on a narrative similarly rooted in the clouds.

Making real the stories that storks bring babies down from the sky, delivering the new borns to awaiting families across the world, here not only humans, but animals too, get their young from the leggy birds. Gus, however, is a lonely cloud, and making dangerous babies, such as crocodiles and tigers, starts to irritate his stork Peck, as his deliveries start to become increasingly dangerous.

From the mere story, you can sense the charm just waiting to be instilled by the talented Pixar team, putting as much effort into the narrative of their short films as they do their full features, while from the only real footage released so far, a 30 second snippet, the animation is again at their very best.

Partly Cloudy will also see the directorial debut of animator, and voice of Remy’s brother Emile, in Ratatouille, Peter Sohn, a mark of passage that suggests we could expect big things from Sohn in the future. The directors of Pixar’s short films often go on to even bigger and better things, working their way up to take charge of their own feature films a few projects later, though at the least, Sohn will be hoping to win back the Oscar for Best Animated Short that Presto somehow didn’t take home earlier in the year.

Partly Cloudy will be attached to Pixar’s upcoming new film Up, out May 29th in America and October 16th in the UK.

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