The resulting spectacle is a blast, punctuated by a new technique Patel called 'illogical lighting,' that marvelously warped sense of reality. Sanjay Patel injected this semi-autobiographical archetypal father-son relationship with Hindu mythology to create something at once unique and relatable. One of Pixar’s most exciting shorts, Sanjay’s Super Team centers on a young Indian boy learning to embrace his culture, and closing the generational chasm between him and his father.

Sanjay's Super Team Released with: The Good Dinosaur (2015) (Note: This list only includes the short films that ran before Pixar's feature films in theaters.) Pixarĥ. In honor of Bao's arrival, we've ranked these little masterpieces. Take, for instance, the company's latest: Bao, which screens with Incredibles 2, manages to go to some unsettling places while also generating deep sentiment for an animated dumpling. Pixar began more as an experimental animation incubator, testing the medium's limits through short films, and these are still where its creators flex, testing out new technology and strange storylines. While the shorts are often sweetly charming, they shouldn't be written off as fluff. Along the way, it has won some Oscars for these endeavors - most recently picking up one for the splendid seaside romp Piper in 2017. In them, the studio has snuck in bits of its company history, wove in threads from its bigger works, and let emerging artists shine. The company has been showcasing the smaller work of its animators alongside its feature films for almost as long as it's been making the latter. Before they saw Toy Story 3, they got an almost abstract hybrid of 2-D and 3-D animation as two blobs representing 'day' and 'night' tussled. Before Pixar fans went to go see A Bug's Life, they got a brief meditation on aging and loneliness.

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