There's a myth that money can't be made on short films. Plympton and Don Hertzfeld are among those to prove the fallacy wrong. Hertzfeld just released a DVD compiled from a decade's worth of work.

While not an appreciable revenue generator, an independent animator's cartoon can still make an occasional, ego-boosting solo appearance in front of a feature film's theatrical run. "It happens all the time," says Smith nonchalantly. "You'll get a $100 rental fee here or there -- there isn't a heck of a lot of money involved. Sometimes I'll make an arrangement with the owner of a theater that hosted a film festival to screen one of my films. It's not the heavy mass distribution you're looking for, but it's cool to have your cartoon before a feature."

It's not hard to have your short run in front of the feature -- if your company created both the feature and the short, that is. It also helps if you have other goals in mind than making money off the short...

"We look at our shorts as research and development for the studio in general," says Osnat Shurer, the exec producer of Pixar Studios' shorts program. "We're developing talent and giving people first-time leadership opportunities in everything: supervising animator, character lead or production designer in almost every film."

Shurer explains that the stakes are lower and the staffs are smaller on the shorts. "Supervising a crew of five people is a great opportunity to learn how to do that with a big crew on a full-fledged feature like Cars. She cites Doug Sweetland, who was supervising animator on Boundin', the short that accompanied The Incredibles, and moved onto to the same position on Cars.

"Not that Doug needed to be trained in animation, he's one of the top computer animators in the industry. It's that he had the opportunity to lead a crew, which is very different. You're looking to make a whole crew animate at something resembling your level, which is a pretty high bar in Doug's case. You're learning how to do bidding [estimating the time it will take to animate a shot] and balancing a production quota with the excellence you're looking for. If you're Doug it's going to take you a lot less time than one of the junior animators on your team. You have to learn how to work with that and help them along."

Pixar's shorts program serves as R&D for the studio and a way to develop talent. Doug Sweetland first supervised the animation on the short, Boundin' (above), before moving onto the same job on Cars. © 2003 Pixar.

>Pixar's shorts program has opened the door to some fascinating career moves for their creative staff. Lifted, the studio's newest short is directed by longtime sound designer Gary Rydstrom and will accompany Ratatouille into theaters next summer. "Gary had no directing experience before Lifted, but he had 13 Oscar nominations for sound design," says Shurer. "He's collaborated with us for many, many years on every Pixar film from Luxo Jr. up to Finding Nemo. Now he's moved onto directing side and will be doing a feature for us down the road."

Beyond the opportunity to deepen Pixar's own talent pool, Shurer considers shorts as a fundamental part of the animation medium. "It's something worthy of protecting," she says. "They're an opportunity for animators, independent animators, people who love the medium to express themselves. That's how we started, so we have a deep tradition of it here. We transitioned from a software/hardware company into an animation studio through short films."

Since Disney's acquisition of Pixar (and John Lasseter taking charge of the Disney animation studio), the Mouse House has followed Pixar's lead in establishing its own shorts program. "We talked to Osnat and the people at Pixar," acknowledges Chuck Williams, the director of Disney's new shorts program. "We saw there were great benefits to what they did. John and Ed [Catmull] said, 'Let's formalize it; let's do it at Disney.'" In addition to cultivating in-house talent, Williams cites "over-delivering" to the audience and avoiding sameness in the features as benefits of a shorts program. "You can tell different kinds of stories, explore different narrative and animation techniques, and artistically get out of your comfort zone. It's a great way to stay in touch with the animation community at large."

In recent years and prior to the new program, Disney produced several shorts including Mike Gabriel's Lorenzo in 2004, and 2003's Destino, bringing a 1940s Dali/Disney collaboration to fruition. "You can even look at Fantasia 2000 as a collection of shorts," Williams muses. "They were all done with same spirit. What we've done with the new leadership is formalize and recognize it as something healthy and worthy of doing."

According to Williams, "the enthusiasm the people here had for the program was incredible. During the first round of pitches this summer we saw 150 ideas over two months -- 55 people came forward to pitch. It wasn't a gong show approach either -- your three minutes are up, thank you very much. People had a half hour to pitch three ideas. They would get notes, they could pitch a second or third time and watch other people pitch to demystify the process."

Eighteen ideas were eventually reviewed by Lasseter. Six of them made it to the story reel stage, from which two were greenlit -- a classic-style Goofy short, How to Hook Up Your Home Theater, co-directed by Kevin Deters and a woman who will become Disney's first female director, Stevie Wermers. The second short comes from Chris Williams, a writer on Mulan and Emperor's New Groove and no relation to Chuck. The CGI-rendered Glago's Guest sounds as unlike a classic Disney short as possible, with its story of a Russian soldier manning a Siberian outpost. One of the two shorts will accompany American Dog, the studio's 2008 release.

"This is our future," Williams sums up. "The young filmmakers doing shorts are the ones you're going to see [directing features] five or six pictures down the road. From a money standpoint I look at it as a creators' 401k. We're investing for the future in our shorts program."