

In February's release, two of the three films were directed by women (with three more films coming later this year). and said they could make a film as long as it was animated and was a narrative, character-based story, that they would be left alone and be given the resources to get a film up?"Ī goal of the SparkShorts program is gender parity, so each set of SparkShorts will feature an equal number of male and female directors. The New York Times reports that Pixar animated feature films "generally cost roughly $175 million to produce."Ĭollins said the idea for SparkShorts stemmed from the idea of art-school projects, where a film has to be produced on deadline with few resources: "We said: What if we chose some filmmakers. Pixar Animation Studios declined to comment on specific budget costs. The SparkShorts also have much smaller budgets.
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Movie Interviews In Pixar's First Female-Directed Short, A Dumpling Child Fills An Empty NestĮach SparkShort takes just six months to produce, compared with four to six years for animated feature films. "And one of the things that came up was just how long it takes for one of our films to get made and therefore the runway for new filmmakers can be very long."
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"As we thought of how to get opportunities to future filmmakers quickly, there was a lot of discussion about what we could be doing in a different way," said Lindsey Collins, Pixar's vice president of development. SparkShorts addresses the major problems in bringing along new directors for feature-length animation: long lead time and big budgets. The first three films were released in February on YouTube.
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This year, Pixar has launched SparkShorts, a series of short animated films designed to give women and people of color more leadership opportunities in animation.

That statistic comes from Cartoon Brew, an independently-owned animation news site that tracked 104 animation releases. and Fox - has been directed solely by women: Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011) by Jennifer Yuh Nelson.

It's even more difficult to become a director in animation.īetween 20, only one major animation release - across Disney, Dreamworks, Universal, Warner Bros. It's difficult to become a director if you're a woman or a person of color in Hollywood. The short film is one of several created through a new Pixar program called SparkShorts. In Purl, a sentient ball of yarn finds itself out of place at the office.
