Talk of two great new Disney shorts has been creeping along the web the last few days. The first short “Presto” is attached to Wall-E and now available via iTunes. The second short is called “Glago’s Guest” and will most likely be attached to "Bolt" which arrives to cinemas before the holidays. Our man Taylor Jessen caught Glago early and had this to share…
Full disclosure: I am a Disney cast member. If you check your program notes, you’ll find that I play the part of “Secretary III” in tonight’s show. But even though I’m on the company payroll, they’re not gonna dump me and bring on the understudy as long as I don’t spoil anything, and I think I’m far enough removed from Production to stay objective, kinda.
Animation people know that Bolt has a little cloud following it. Old director fired, new director hired. The new director’s name is Chris Williams. IMDB him and you will find he is an accomplished story man. But can he direct?, one wonders. Ratatouille changed directors mid-stream too, and it rocked – but still, that was Brad Bird. We need a sign.
Here is one very good sign: Glago’s Guest, the new Disney short Chris Williams directed that will be attached to Bolt. Glago’s Guest premiered at Annecy, and won’t be seen by the general public until it opens in front of Bolt – both flat and, when appropriate, in Disney Digital 3D – in November.
I’m no hardcore Disney connoisseur, but I think I’ve gathered a reliable impression over my lifetime of the kind of thing one can expect from the Mouse House, animation-wise. This is like NOTHING in the Disney filmography. Put aside all the gee-whiz steroid-juicing comic book action we’ve seen this year, last year, every year, and just try to remember the last really good straight science-fiction moviegoing experience you had. Something where the viewer is dropped into someone’s prosaic little world somewhere on this planet and something awesome happens. Think Primer or Close Encounters or Contact.
Glago is a Russian soldier in a deserted frontier outpost in 1924. This outpost is a clean-air, big-sky plain, a snowy version of the Black Rock Desert playa. Were it to host a Siberian Burning Man, six million people could park there, and then instantly freeze to death. The guard tower is a highly evolved shack, cozy inside, stretching up a few stories, with a little sign stuck in the ground so you know you’ve arrived. Which you haven’t, because no one ever does. We meet Glago outside during a blizzard, bundled in furs with binoculars pressed to his bearded, bushy-eyebrowed, snow-dripping face as he stares at the horizon confirming the imminent arrival of no one whatsoever. Night falls. The skies clear. Binoculars. No one is coming now, either. He sits at his desk and takes some notes about no one. Notes from previous days describing their previous no ones suggest that today was not atypical. Dinner, some 78s on the Victrola, a book, bed.
The next day it’s clear and sunny, and Glago goes out again. He scans the horizon and confirms the precipitance of not one bloody human being as far as the eye can see. Then he hears a low rumble. He looks north, south, east, and west, but still he sees nobody coming. Then he looks up, and things start getting seriously atypical.
Glago’s Guest is, no kidding, a poker-faced sci-fi thriller that’s completely uninterested in being cute and telegraphing gags and more interested in simply being awesome. Apparently we do this now. Based on evidence of the past year, Walt Disney Animation Studios is now ready and willing to produce both the likes of Goofy Presents How To Hook Up Your Home Theater and Glago’s Guest, two very different notes in a gamut that’s suddenly much broader than anyone could have guessed.
Williams pitched the short two years ago, and it was green-lit before he got onboard with Bolt. Glago was put aside at first when Williams got his new gig – but then a bunch of crewmembers gathered to demand its completion, and John Lasseter said “Yes, please.” Two years and lots and lots of downtime hours later, they finished it in time for Annecy this month. The music is by John Brion, and the landscape design features the single best sky I’ve ever seen in CGI.
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