On How to Hook Up Your Home Theater, the directors collaborated with some of Disney's best 2D animators during their downtime, including Eric Goldberg, Mark Henn, Andreas Deja and Dale Baer. "I was intimate with Goofy, drawing him a lot, but I never actually animated him before," Goldberg admits. "Kevin and Stevie had an obvious preference for the Kinney Goofy and we all gravitated toward animator John Sibley, who had very smoothly drawn Goofys. In other words, he took the streamlining thing and made it fun and elastic, so if Goofy smiled, you could really see the splay on the jowels, and every time he grabbed something, his fingers would splay out -- the art of Goofyness, so to speak. He probably did the craziest animation too in those How to cartoons. And that's certainly who I tried to emulate. That said, when you're trying to emulate the guy who does it the most exuberantly and the most loosely, that's a tall order. You have to cut loose a little bit and not be tight. One of the fun scenes I did was Goofy tangled around the speakers. If you look at it frame-by-frame, you see I'm trying to do a zillion kinds of leg actions as an homage to the Sibley style of animation. There's a lot of overlapping. It's not just a question of Goofy going from A to Z; it's how he does it. It's daunting, but fun."

John Lasseter is proud of how Deters and Wermers have handled Goofy, in a juxtaposition of the past and present that's totally relevant for today's audience -- and so entertaining.

Goldberg's main contribution was animating an early football fantasy, and he was allowed to implement a crucial suggestion: "When Goofy first fantasized that he was on the football field, they had him scared -- seeing the oncoming players and going, 'Wow!' But I said, no, this is his fantasy and he'd be smiling all the way through it."

Goldberg, who is currently animating a character for The Princess and the Frog 2D feature, is also boarding his own short involving Mickey, Donald & Goofy. "It's in the vein of Boat Builders. The format allows each of the characters to have their own personality set pieces. That's what makes them, them, and so fun to watch. It's as if you could transplant a great comedian from the past, in their prime, and bring them into the present. That's the great thing about animation. With Goofy, he's always in the round. As much as you can distort him, he's always volumetric -- he will always turn around in space. And then there are the little things: Goofy's eyes can be very bland if you don't put them slightly together. And also the pupils have to be very long. Otherwise, they look like they're unfocused."

For Henn, returning Goofy to his roots consisted of animating most of the football sequences, along with some other early odds and ends. He had the added benefit of utilizing the original football stadium background from How to Play Football and the same exterior house from Motor Mania. "In designing the football players, we went for more of a contemporary look to their uniforms, while keeping it simple. There's sophistication to animating Goofy, even though he's zany. He has structure and you want to give weight, which is what makes it all so believable. As I've said about Mickey Mouse, it's easy to draw badly.

"By the same token, those characters are fairly forgiving when you're drawing. You can have some wild and crazy poses and expressions, but there's a realm that still says this is Goofy." Henn also got to inject some amusing inside jokes during the pile-up at the end, including a character from Hockey Homicide, Goofy and the horse from How to Ride a Horse and the little chalk stick figure from How to Play Golf.

There was an epiphany of sorts for Deja, who had actually given up on the legacy characters. "Believe it or not, there was a time when I thought that maybe you could no longer draw these characters in a modern environment in an appealing toy-world kind of way. And I was proven wrong with the right idea and the right story.

On How to Hook Up Your Home Theater, the directors collaborated with some of Disney's best 2D animators during their downtime, including Eric Goldberg (l) and Andreas Deja.

"I think the one discovery for me was how to get that looseness in Goofy's clothes because he's not wearing all that much -- basically pants and a T-shirt. But even that you can play with in terms of wrinkles and secondary action in the way that he moves. And, somehow, even though that sounds like a technical thing, it adds to the personality and a comic quality to the way he moves like an acrobat. I kept one thing in mind. I got to meet Art Babbitt way back a few times and he gave Goofy the personality in the beginning. He defined Goofy as somebody who thinks about something long and hard and then does it wrong. The first scene I got was Goofy trying to open up the cable box. Like so many people, I've been there: that and DVD boxes. I get so frustrated that I hurt myself. That whole business of him trying to pull it apart, hammering on it and the thing is unchanged. And then he relaxes for a second and this drop of sweat comes down... it's so classic -- just the whole agony of it."

As with the Pixar program, there's also a certain element of technical experimentation with the new Disney shorts. On How to Hook Up Your Home Theater, it was going 50% paperless with Toon Boom's Harmony software (including cleanup and ink-and-paint) using Wacom's Cintiq tablets.

"The whole idea of going primarily paperless with the Harmony/Cintiq package was not only to make the short efficiently, but also to set the table for the 2D features coming down the road [starting with The Princess and the Frog]," explains Deters. "What they wanted to do from a leadership standpoint is examine how we did things in the past and figure out what we could do better.