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Screengrab via Borrowed Time/Vimeo

Pixar animators spent 5 years making this devastatingly beautiful short film in their spare time

Stop what you're doing and watch this.

 

Austin Powell

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Posted on Oct 14, 2016   Updated on May 25, 2021, 7:22 pm CDT

Pixar animators Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj’s brilliant short film has been racking up accolades on the festival circuit, and now you can watch it on Vimeo

Borrowed Time captures a lonely sheriff as he stares down the barrel of a painful memory from his past. The film has a plaintive score by composer Gustavo Santaolalla (Brokeback Mountain, Babel).   

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“The goal for us was to make something that kind of contested the notion of animation being a genre, and one for children specifically,” Hamou-Lhadj says in an accompanying featurette. “ We really wanted to make something that was a little bit more adult in the thematic choices and show that animation could be a medium to tell any sort of story.”

To that end, Borrowed Time accomplishes more in six minutes than most movies do in two hours. (Editor’s note: The directors have turned the video on private. Below, we’ve embedded the trailer.)

Borrowed Time is a fitting title, given the circumstances Coats and  Hamou-Lhadj made the film under. It was by possible through Pixar’s Co-op program, an internal professional development program that allows employees to use Pixar resources in their free time. The film took over five years to make.

“There were a lot of technical hurdles,” Coats told Carton Brew. “There’s a team of people who are usually on one of our movies that we really didn’t have available to help on our team. So we had to build everything.”

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*First Published: Oct 14, 2016, 5:12 pm CDT