Bowled Over


Winston, a small gray-and-white terrier, at a food bowl full of kibble
Screencap © 2014 Disney Enterprises.

The new animated Disney feature Big Hero 6 opens this weekend. I’m not being insensitive to the cost of movie tickets when I say the six-minute animated short that precedes it, “Feast”, is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Luckily, Big Hero 6 is good enough that you don’t really have to test that premise,
but this little dog’s tale really is a treat. “Feast” was directed by Patrick Osborne, head
of animation on the acclaimed, Oscar-winning 2012 Disney short “Paperman” and co-head of animation on Big Hero 6, from which he was allowed to take a sabbatical to produce “Feast” as part of Disney Animation’s Spark program. It focuses on a Boston terrier named Winston and the food he enjoys with his person, their life together glimpsed almost exclusively and quite poignantly from a sort of “bowl's-eye view” that places the gleefully gluttonous Winston center stage.

“Feast” is one in a growing line of diverse features and shorts, from 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph and “Paperman” to last year’s Mickey Mouse meta-mashup “Get a Horse!” and the Frozen juggernaut to Big Hero 6 itself, marking another renaissance at Disney Animation. While I’d still love to see a return to traditional line animation, there’s no denying that Disney is turning out some exciting, innovative, moving work worthy of
its storied history.



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