Day & Night (theatrical; 6:01)
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This played in theaters before Toy Story 3 (to which the short is not related). It's available on the DVD of that movie, and on the Pixar Short Films Collection, volume 2. Um... it's about these two sort of anthropomorphized representations of daytime and nighttime. The background is totally black, with these sort of simplistic outlines of cartoonish people. Within each outline, we see scenes of little pieces of our world (the scenes shift as the figures move through their own world of blackness). In one of the figures, the scene is always daytime, and in the other it's always nighttime. They can see these scenes playing out within themselves, and each other. And there seems to be some competition about which is better, day or night. But they seem to become friends in the end.

I dunno, the film is probably one of the most bizarre, surreal things I've ever seen. But it was kind of interesting, and maybe sort of philosophic, though it's not clear to me what exactly the message is, beyond "there's some good things about day and some good things about night." Which seems kind of... obvious. I'm sure it must be a "grass is greener" type of metaphor, or something, but I wasn't wild about it. *shrug* Oh, and the interiors of the characters were 3-D while the characters themselves were 2-D, which is kind of neat. So I'm listing the short under both "CGI" and "animation". Actually, I think I liked it more the second time I watched it, when I got the short films collection. It's kind of clever how a lot of the time what's going on inside each character sort of thematically matches what's going on with the characters themselves. There's also a radio message the characters listen to, about some people automatically disliking anything new. That seemed kind of random to me, but I suppose it could have to do with people who dismiss computer animation in favor of traditional animation, in which case this is actually the perfect short to address that. But it's not explicit. Anyway, I still don't love the short, even if my appreciation for it improved somewhat from the first time I saw it. But it's definitely interesting, artistically.