Goofy is hand-drawn in Home Theater, but in true 21st century style, the short was 50% paperless thanks to Toon Boom's Harmony software (including cleanup and ink-and-paint) using Wacom's Cintiq tablets.

"Dale Baer, who worked on Winnie the Pooh and Robin Hood, embraced the paperless experiment. Andreas, Eric and Mark worked on paper. It's about finding what works best for individuals, what works best for the pipeline and as an ongoing process that will continue to evolve on some of the other features we're working on as well."

For Baer, who had no problem learning Maya a few years back, he was just as eager to be a guinea pig on the Goofy short. "Frankly, I like drawing on the Cintiq. I like the size and it's comfortable to hold and it's got the best eraser in the world. Your work comes out cleaner. You can shoot an instant test automatically without having to take out all the drawings. When Toon Boom brought Harmony to the studio, it was intriguing but it was missing facets that animators were accustomed to. Toon Boom made the necessary modifications for more high-end productions. They have so many tools now that I don't even touch 75%. They developed the texture brush, which acts more like a pencil. That was revolutionary. It's great for pencil tests. They have a bottom light where you can see where your characters bend and where they're going, so you can actually check out your arcs. And you can put the background level down. You don't have level problems with your drawings. No paper flicker, so you have cleaner pencil tests. You can control the thickness of lines. There's lots of latitude."

Thus far, How to Hook Up Your Home Theater has played at the Ottawa Animation Festival and the Chicago Children's Festival, qualifying for Oscar consideration. However, the Goofy short will screen theatrically with National Treasure: Book of Secrets on Dec. 21.

Home Theater's Deters and Wermers are halfway through their second short, The Ballad of Nessie, a sweet origin story about a female Loch Ness monster.

Meanwhile, Deters and Wermers are halfway through their second short, The Ballad of Nessie, a sweet origin story about a female Loch Ness monster. Nessie, also in 2D, is a continuation of a student project Wermers began at CalArts. Baer, Deja and Henn have been recruited once again. Nessie, according to Wermers, "is very different from crazy Goofy, with much more subtle acting." Inspired by Mary Blair, it has the painterly look and feel of a lovely children's book. After that, Deters and Wermers would like to do another Goofy short.

However, next up for Disney is Glago's Guest, a 3D, stereoscopic short by Chris Williams. It's about a Russian soldier guarding a Siberian outpost who has a strange encounter with an extraterrestrial. The director of the shorts program describes it as "serious, suspenseful and arty," with new texture development as its technical innovation. "On Glago, they are really pushing 3D animation," adds Chuck Williams. "There's human animation and a step toward what they're doing on Rapunzel, but also the hair and cloth were a challenge beyond what has ever been done before at Disney. Shapes are stylized and pushed, and the proportions are exaggerated, but the environments and detail are photoreal."

Disney's next short is Glago's Guest, a 3D, stereoscopic work by Chris Williams that is serious, suspenseful and arty, containing innovative texture development for the studio.

In fact, Lasseter was so impressed with Glago that he assigned Williams to take over the 3D-animated Bolt feature (formerly Chris Sanders' American Dog). Glago's Guest is scheduled to debut at the Annecy Animated Film Festival next year and play theatrically with Bolt (Nov. 26, 2008).

"It's also nice to stay in touch because all around the world there's this wonderful community of animators that get together at animation festivals," Lasseter suggests. "It's great to send a film to these festivals... Pixar's been doing it for a long time; I used to do it with my films. I have lifelong friends from these festivals. And it's very artistic -- these festivals are about the art of animation, not just the commerce. I love both studios being a part of that."

And to further nurture talent, the shorts program has been extended into the "Shorts Club," in which anyone in animation can pitch a short and make it on their own if they can get volunteers to help out. There are five projects currently in production, including a spin-off of Meet the Robinsons.

"It's a wonderful opportunity to utilize studio talent and equipment in their spare time, downtime or on weekends," Williams offers. "Currently there are a trainer, a layout artist and an animator making shorts. The ability to lead and inspire is a big plus. These are people that are learning on their own."

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.