Partly Cloudy

Voices of: Tony Fucile, Lori Richardson
Directed by: Peter Sohn
Rating: G
Genre: Animation, Short, Comedy
Length: 6 minutes
2009

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: Clouds create babies of all different species, who are then delivered by storks. One cloud makes only dangerous animal babies, much to the chagrin of the stork in charge of delivering them.

Review:

Tim: Working my way through Pixar's original shorts, I've seen both truly effective ones and lackluster ones. Their track record of strong shorts is impressive, though. You can add Partly Cloudy to that list. This is easily one of the better ones they've made. Curiously, though, this one wasn't nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short, breaking their 6-film streak. It's far superior to For the Birds (an Academy Award winner), One Man Band, Boundin', and Lifted, at least to me.

The film tells the often-told story about storks delivering babies. The twist here is that the babies are created in clouds. This isn't a remarkable idea, but it's different and it works within the context of this film. Seeing this baby-making and baby-delivery system is fun, and the animation of the clouds is impressive. It's really beautiful to watch.

The story really begins when we see a bit of a darker cloud who makes a series of "dangerous" babies. Whereas most of the clouds are doing humans, cats, and dogs, this one is doing alligators, rams, porcupines, etc. The problem is that the stork in charge of delivering these continually gets attacked and hurt by these animals. It's a pretty rough job and you don't blame him when he starts looking at the other storks and wishing he worked for their clouds. This whole thing is really funny- you see the stork land, wonder what dangerous animal the cloud is going to create next, and then laugh as the stork must deal with it. My five year-old son and 22 month-old daughter both had a lot of fun watching this story unfold.

It's cute and entertaining, but there's a nice moment towards the end that digs into that classic Pixar emotion. It's a nice way to wrap the story, pull on the heartstrings a bit, and make the movie memorable. I had a lot of fun with Partly Cloudy and think it's one of the better Pixar shorts. I wonder what happened that this film missed out on an Oscar nomination when so many lesser films got them. Whatever, the Academy was wrong on this one- this is a terrific short film.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: N/A



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