In praise of Luxo Jr – the short film that changed cinema

Few film com­pa­ny mas­cots are as recog­nis­able or icon­ic as Pixar’s. If you’ve ever seen one of their films, you’ll be famil­iar with their ani­mat­ed pro­duc­tion logo: a lamp jumps across the screen until it reach­es the ​‘I’ in the studio’s name, which it pro­ceeds to bounce on until it deflates. The lamp stands there, glances down, then up, and final­ly side­ways towards the audi­ence, its bulb con­tin­u­ing to glow as the screen fades to black – fit­ting, as the short film that inspired the logo, Luxo Jr, was very much a ​‘let there be light’ moment for both the stu­dio and com­put­er animation.

Pre­mier­ing at the com­put­er ani­ma­tion graph­ics con­fer­ence SIG­GRAPH on 17 August, 1986, Luxo Jr focus­es on the attempts of a child lamp to play with its par­ent. The film begins with a lamp com­ing to life as a ball that has rolled into frame hits it. The lamp repeat­ed­ly rolls the ball away, but it keeps com­ing back, until a small­er lamp jumps into the frame, fol­low­ing the ball on its trav­els and encour­ag­ing its par­ent to play along. The child lamp then bounces up and down on the ball until it deflates, with the sound effects reused for the studio’s logo. Upset, the child lamp dis­ap­pears from the scene only to reemerge with a larg­er beach ball, caus­ing the par­ent to despon­dent­ly shake its head at the camera.

While such move­ment may be unre­mark­able by today’s stan­dards, in the mid ​’80s the tech­nol­o­gy required to pro­duce such rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple imagery meant that the short received a thun­der­ous recep­tion. Yet the suc­cess of Luxo Jr can be mea­sured not only through its var­i­ous tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs, which paved the way for com­put­er ani­mat­ed fea­tures, but also in the way it used tech­nol­o­gy in ser­vice of emo­tion­al storytelling.

In just two min­utes the film cre­ates a tan­gi­ble and last­ing con­nec­tion between these two lamps. This is crys­tallised in the moment the ball deflates, with the film man­ag­ing to con­vey a sense of char­ac­ter between these every­day, seem­ing­ly inan­i­mate objects. The film’s writer/​director John Las­seter has recalled how after the pre­miere he was approached by Jim Blinn, a renowned Amer­i­can com­put­er sci­en­tist, who had a ques­tion. Being at a com­put­er graph­ics con­fer­ence, Las­seter expect­ed it to be one he couldn’t answer, some­thing about the tech­no­log­i­cal process­es behind the film. Instead, Blinn want­ed to know whether the par­ent lamp was a moth­er or a father. It was at that pre­cise moment Lass­es­ter knew they had struck gold.

Although only two min­utes long, Luxo Jr shaped the next three decades of cin­e­ma. Thir­ty years on, the cin­e­mat­ic land­scape has been unde­ni­ably and irre­versibly altered as a result of its suc­cess. And it is because of this that Pixar main­tains its prac­tice of pre­ced­ing their fea­ture films with shorts, as the stu­dio looks to allow its junior film­mak­ers to exper­i­ment with new tech­niques and sto­ries. It may be a long time before we see anoth­er short film that has the same seis­mic impact of Luxo Jr, a film which proved tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion is noth­ing with­out emo­tion­al resonance.