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Newton's Law: Day & Night

Bill Desowitz has the first look at Pixar's new short, Day & Night, with director Teddy Newton.
By Bill Desowitz | Thursday, May 27, 2010 at 4:05 pm
Posted In | Magazines: AnimationWorld

Check out the Day & Night clip and exclusive 3-D tests at AWNtv!

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Teddy Newton had no idea that mixing hand-drawn with CG would be so difficult. Courtesy of Disney/Pixar.

One glimpse of Day & Night, Pixar's latest short screening in front of Toy Story 3 on June 18, and you can see how Teddy Newton loves playing with shapes. His inventive six-minute tale about Day and Night discovering each other's unique qualities by offering a different window into the same world, mixes hand-drawn (the characters) and CG animation (the interior world) as you've never experienced it.

Think The Dot and the Line meets Duck Amuck (two crucial inspirations) and you'll see what I mean.

"I have a knack for seeing shapes in negative spaces," admits Newton, who attended Cal Arts with fellow Pixarians Mark Andrews and Lou Romano, and has contributed character designs to Ratatouille, Your Friend the Rat and Presto, and created the end titles to The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Newton also voices Chatter Telephone in Toy Story 3.

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Newton excels at tangents, but Brad Bird taught him to stay on point.

"One day I just put eyeballs on a keyhole and thought this would be funny as a gag," Newton continues. "I was having the eyes on the keyhole look into itself and you could see what it was seeing inside of a room. And the benefit of this was that by making it a character, the keyhole could move around the room and reveal things. This keyhole could see everything it wanted to see. I had a pile of gags that I was left with and had to make sense of that."

Yet he recalls how Brad Bird taught him a valuable lesson when they first started working together on Iron Giant. "The reason he hired me from the very beginning is that I could go on so many [visual] tangents," Newton explains. "I could just keep coming up with things that had vague [connections] to the movie but inspired him. The thing that he had taught me was how to stay on point. It took me forever to do this, and I actually got the chance to use it while making this film, because I could imagine just getting caught up in the special effects and having it end up being a big pinball machine without a point."

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Comments


All of my questions settled-thknas!

Gina (not verified) | Mon, 08/29/2011 - 08:20 | Permalink

I have been a Teddy Newton fan for a while, ever since an instructor showed us Teddy's work on the Iron Giant's extras features on the DVD. Night and Day was amazing, creative, heart warming and inspirational. The Pixar bar has been raised!

Leonor. N (not verified) | Wed, 07/07/2010 - 10:18 | Permalink

Man you really need to see it. Your initial impression and the opinion you have offered is way off and besides the point. Many people are saying it's brilliant and it is.

Brian Clarke (not verified) | Tue, 07/06/2010 - 13:44 | Permalink

You need to get back on those meds...lighten up !
This was inspired.

Anonymous (not verified) | Wed, 06/30/2010 - 16:10 | Permalink

This was a blatant attempt at homosexual indoctrination. I saw it plain as day when the quote from Dr. Wayne Dryer came on coupled with the blobs doing their gay dance.

Anonymous (not verified) | Wed, 06/30/2010 - 09:50 | Permalink

= ) I wachted this short... it's just amazing,i have never seen nothing like it.

The message it has it is great also...

I admire : p Pixar work!

YenroY (not verified) | Tue, 06/29/2010 - 19:57 | Permalink

From the sneak peeks here on AWN this looks terrible (haven't seen the full thing yet). A clipping mask on badly animated 2d drawings and mediocre 3d behind it.

Gary (not verified) | Sun, 06/27/2010 - 16:30 | Permalink
5

Have seen it in Annecy during the pixar's conference  for the festival) this Friday (world premiere I guess), and it's brilliant.

Congratulation Teddy Newton and Pixar for this marvelous short!

maillegr | Sun, 06/13/2010 - 01:50 | Permalink

This will be another triumph for Pixar.

Woo (not verified) | Sat, 06/05/2010 - 11:56 | Permalink

Amazing! I love when 2D is used creatively like this. The negative space idea is really clever. I can't wait to see how this looks with Toy Story 3!

Awesomesaurous (not verified) | Thu, 06/03/2010 - 19:23 | Permalink

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