Date Released: 2010
Theatrically Released Alongside: Toy Story 3
Day and Night is the second Pixar short to use both 2D and 3D animation, with Ratatouille’s bonus short Your Friend the Rat being first. Unlike Your Friend the Rat, Day and Night doesn’t just use both 2D and 3D, but merges them together, creating its main characters Day and Night with 2D and the worlds inside them with CGI. The short’s concept is highly unique, featuring two sentiment beings whose insides consist of an entire world—one during the day, and the other during the night. Day’s inside features activities seen primarily during the daytime, while Night features nighttime events (sounding like a broken record here). The activities inside also represent Day and Night’s emotions and actions, such as buzzing bees representing anger for Day, and fireworks representing excitement for Night.
The idea is clever, and is incorporated into a moral about fearing the unknown—with both Day and Night going through various emotional stages until they come to accept each other for having equally interesting aspects (along with some help from a 1970s lecture by Dr. Wayne Dyer). The short concludes on a touching twist, and combined with its humor and an effective moral, Day and Night succeeds as more than just an experiment in animation.
