Pixar Busted!
November 8, 2007

Produced in 1989 and originally exhibited at animation and shorts festivals before in went on to a renewed life in theaters preceding Finding Nemo in 2003, Knick Knack, the computer-animated Pixar short film directed by John Lasseter. I was psyched to hear that it was going to be a segment in the just-released Disney DVD Pixar Short Films Collection: Vol.1 as I missed it when I saw Finding Nemo in the theater (okay, I walked in a little late!) and I don’t own the Nemo disc.

It’s a cute little short about a snowman in a souvenir snow globe who yearns to break out of his crystalline prison to reach the “Sunny Miami” tchochke on the other side of the shelf. Adorning the Miami knick knack, you see, is

Yeah, it was the cute little short I’d remembered seeing all those years ago at some New York festival, but my smile soured a bit when I discovered that it was NOT the original Knick Knack from the pre-Nemo days. In the version on the Pixar Shorts disc, the Miami beach babe appears to have a received a radical breast reduction – and I mean radical along the lines of nary a bustline to be seen! Now, I’m not saying that I need to have my animated female characters to maintain a certain level of bustiness (except for Jessica Rabbit—if anyone messes with those legendarily formidable curves, then I’m outta here!), but I don’t understand why the short included in the new disc can’t be the original one. The blogosphere is theorizing, probably correctly, that the re-rendering was probably administered to make the short more family friendly.

Could it have been a mandate from parent company Disney so that their core family audience's feathers wouldn't get ruffled? I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure that there are plenty of busty lovelies in Miami! And there are more of the same in Hollywood, aren’t there? Come to think of it, don't lots and lots of women have breasts?

Posted by Laurence Lerman on November 8, 2007 | Comments (2)