One Man Band’s Mark Andrews and Andy Jimenez devised an ending in which the two battling musicians teamed up and make beautiful music together. They found that it was a nice message, but it wasn’t funny. All One Man Band image

In Pixar’s new short One Man Band, two Renaissance musicians with miniature orchestras on their backs attempt to separate a little girl from her money. They wear the closed-mouth smiles and winking eyes of the hardened professional, but they’re wearing more than that: Bass (the guy with, among other things, the bass) and Treble (the guy with the ten tiny violins) have more than a passing resemblance to co-directors Mark Andrews and Andy Jimenez, respectively. When I tell Andrews that I think Treble, in his quest to earn the girl’s single gold coin, sports a smile without an ounce of pleasure in it, he cries, “That’s why he’s the bastard character, and Bass is the happy-go-lucky kind of chap.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Jimenez retorts. “The bass character’s also the lazy one. The older, sadder one.”

Of course leave it to Osnat Shurer, producer of the short and the third party on this conference call, to really lay things out. “Get over it,” she says, “you’re watching the money.”

Yes, they actually boarded a version of One Man Band where the two battling musicians teamed up at the end and made beautiful music together. And though it was a smooth collaboration, really, between the directors and their crew, making their story about a smooth collaboration didn’t work as well. “Teaming up is a nice message,” says Andrews, “but it ain’t funny. So once we ripped that out, and we could just go for blood with these guys, that was fun.”

Andrews and Jimenez, two long-time storyboard artists, came to Pixar in 2000 to work on The Incredibles at the command of their liege lord Brad Bird, for whom the two had both worked on Iron Giant. Near the end of their tours of duty on Incredibles a meeting came up on both of their calendars with studio head Ed Catmull. It was unexpected and a little alarming, like an unscheduled trip to the principal’s office, but when it was over they had been given the task of coming up with three ideas for the new Pixar short.

Mark and Andrew starting having lunch together every day, filling their idea notebook with 50 pitches, which they then culled to 40, 20, 10 and finally three. The winner was of a topic they were both passionate about — music. While Incredibles and One Man Band proceeded on double schedules, the two directors snagged their third creative partner, composer Michael Giacchino.

Getting composer Michael Giacchino was key to the success of One Man Band. The directors felt the movie would live or die by the original music.

“Getting him was key,” says Jimenez, “because once One Man Band was green-lit, it became very apparent this film would live or die by who we got to do the music. Our characters’ voices are the music. The movie’s about musical one-upsmanship. And getting Giacchino was one of our biggest coups, because we got Michael at the very beginning. At one time we had four different endings we were toying with, and he wrote music to all four. He became our third story man.”

A short is obviously a less pressurized production environment than a feature, and One Man Band gave Pixar’s top brass a chance to give a bunch of up-and-coming artists a chance to lead their own departments for the first time — and to try some new variations on old techniques.

“The film is rich on tons of different levels,” says Andrews, “because of our crew taking the established technologies in new directions, from the cloth simulation to how we build the sets.” The elaborate opening background, for instance — a fabulous CinemaScope money shot with the piazza in the foreground, an entire city in the middle ground, and mountain peaks and God-ray sunlight beaming down behind — was still rigged using only four building templates, four roofs, two windows and one door. “There’s a lot of detail,” Andrews says, “but it was simply done, because Bill Polson had this idea of how we can get a lot of bang for our buck by just building variety into the models that we can turn up or down.”

They’re not test-driving any fabulous new technology with the short, so One Man Band is simply Pixar’s way of shoring up some of their key strengths — great animation from the likes of Angus MacLane, great production design from Ronnie Del Carmen, and a dedication to believability rather than realism. In a short where the two characters start on just a couple instruments apiece and end sounding like a 38-piece orchestra, one guy can be a whole jazz trio, and someone can do an 88-key glissando down a piano a foot long — you buy it.

And of course it’s a re-declaration of principles from a studio so committed to shorts, they’re spliced into the first reel of the feature so exhibitors can’t not show them. “We did see a bit of trend there, just for a moment, with The ChubbChubbs and a few other things,” says Shurer, “where people were making some short films and then throwing them in front of the features. And we were thrilled. I remember having a conversation with Ed Catmull — he was just beside himself. It’s like, ‘All right! What can we do to encourage these people?’ Because we want more! We want everybody to be making shorts. All we can do is set an example.”