Up And Away
I had the great pleasure of seeing Up in the theatre tonight. Well before the feature flickered it’s first scenes of animated brilliance, the audience of roughly 5 people, including me (hey, it was a late showing), were presented with a Pixar short film titled, “Partly Cloudy.” It set the tone for the rest of the night.
In “Partly Cloudy,” we see the process of how babies are born… just not the way you might imagine. We are talking storks and such. The process starts with the clouds, which create babies of all species, essentially from themselves, with cloud material. The storks then take the bundles down to their rightful recipients. The short has no dialog, just grunting, meowing, snorting, and a bunch of other cool noises.
The story focuses on one storm cloud, not bright white like the others. He seems to be sort of an outcast. Rather than make nice cuddly puppies, he’s making electric eels, crocodiles, and sharks. The poor stork who has to carry his creations to their eventual homes takes some exception to the lot. Eventually, the stork leaves him for another cloud, at which point the cloud gets angry and shows his anger with lighting and thunder. He then gets sad, and the cloud starts raining. It was all for not, as the stork simply went to another cloud to get a football helmut and some padding. The dark cloud gets happy again, and continues on with his purpose.
