Feast

A six-minute short from Walt Disney Animation that tells a man's life entirely through the plates put down in front of his dog. Winston is a puppy who finds a chip on the street. James takes him in and starts feeding him. What follows is all food: meatballs, eggs, pizza, spaghetti. As the man's life changes the plate changes, and the dog greets each change with approval or dismay. Relationships, separations and reconciliations are legible from those plates alone, without a single line of human dialogue. That is the craft of the idea: all the narrative information is loaded onto a side detail, the only thing the dog sees. Technically it uses a method called Meander, which combines hand drawing with computer animation and was developed earlier for Paperman. Patrick Osborne directed. It screened at the Annecy animation festival in 2014, played in cinemas in November ahead of Big Hero 6, and won the Oscar for best animated short. Exactly the right scale for anyone who likes short animation and storytelling without dialogue. For a viewer wanting a feature, it runs six minutes and suits someone looking for something finished in one sitting.