Once Upon a Studio

A short animated film. It was made for a studio's hundredth year. The idea is simple: all the characters will gather in the building one night and one photograph will be taken. The narrative begins in the real office building. The footage is live action; the corridors, the doors and the posters on the walls are a real place. Then the characters step out of the posters. From there the film is about a gathering. Hundreds of characters from a hundred years of catalogue walk the same corridor; old black and white drawings, princesses of the classic period, arrivals from computer animation and minor figures who appeared in one film only. The jokes rest on recognition: who does what when they meet whom, which character will not fit through a door, who breaks the lift. One passage goes somewhere emotional. An old character stands at the top of the stairs and the voice is taken from the archive; the actor is no longer living. What the narrative is interested in is not story but continuity: the film celebrates a company's own history and does it openly. There are hundreds of characters, many of them speaking with their original voice actors or from archive recordings. It runs under ten minutes. Dan Abraham and Trent Correy directed. Who it is for: anyone who grew up with the studio's films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a story of its own; the film is a celebration from beginning to end and characters you do not know mean nothing to you.