Kitbull

I could watch Pixar movies all day. Up, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Brave, Inside Out, Ratatouille, Coco, Cars—doesn’t matter. I’d cry and laugh through every single one. Wall-E falls apart after the first thirty minutes, Up gets worse as it goes, and Cars is basically for kids whose drunk dads force them to watch Formula 1. But Pixar is Pixar. They’ve earned it.

Every couple of months they put out these shorts—either before the films or straight online. Piper, Lou, Bao. Little perfect things that pack a whole emotional life into a few minutes. You laugh, then you cry, then you feel better, and that’s all there is. That’s how everything should work.

Kitbull is the newest one. Rosana Sullivan directed a short about a pit bull and a stray cat in San Francisco’s Mission District. The pit bull’s had a rough time. The cat is shy. They become friends. Sullivan said she started with a cat video she liked, just wanted to draw something cute, and then it turned into something more personal, something real. You can feel that turn in the film itself.

There’s something about how these shorts work that I can’t quite pin down. They take the smallest, simplest idea and make it matter completely. Two animals becoming friends. A boy growing up. A rat cooking. And the animation is so precise that you stop noticing it’s animation—the cat moves like an actual cat, the pit bull has actual weight to him. Before you realize it you’re sitting there attached to these figures in a way that should take an hour to earn but somehow happens in five minutes.

I watched it after a long day and it got to me. Not because it was trying to, but just because it was true. That’s the whole thing, really. Pixar figures out how to be true without ever trying hard. They just show you something and let you feel it.