Disney revealed to Reuters that the company plans to produce and release up to four Toy Story short films a year. Naturally, this is at least in part to keep the franchise in public view because of the massive amount of money Toy Story merchandising brings in. Andy Mooney, head of Disney’s consumer products division, says the shorts will remain thematically similar to the movies, unlike the Buzz Lightyear of Star Command Disney TV series that followed Buzz’s exploits as a fictional space hero. He added that “the strength of the property rests on the relationship between the core characters,” so it seems likely we’ll see lots of the core characters. Each short would be less than seven minutes long, similar to the Cars short films. It’s unclear whether the films’ voice actors will be contributing to these shorts. Hopefully that can be worked out, because it’s hard to imagine other people bringing life to Woody and Buzz.
While not confirmed here, I would assume these short films will be produced at the freshly opened Vancouver expansion to Pixar’s operations. That branch was created to handle the offshoots to Pixar’s properties, like short films and video content for Disney’s amusement park attractions. Meanwhile the main Pixar offices in Emeryville will be focused on the feature films and the major theatrical short films.
It’s not clear when the first of these shorts would be finished or released, nor exactly what distribution methods would be used. The obvious possibilities would be simple web releases or appearances on the Disney Channel, but it’s also conceivable that Disney could leverage them by pairing ‘em up with other theatrical feature releases. It’ll likely be combination of those, as previously seen with the Cars Toons series of shorts.
Until then, Toy Story 3 arrives in just a short while on June 18th.
