Geri's Game

Geri's Game is a 1997 American computer-animated short film produced by Pixar and written and directed by Jan Pinkava. The short, which shows an elderly man named Geri who competes with himself in a game of chess, was Pixar's first film to feature a human being as its main character; Geri later made a cameo appearance in Toy Story 2 as "The Cleaner", here voiced by Jonathan Harris instead of Bob Peterson. Geri's Game was released eight years after Knick Knack, the last short by Pixar to that point, made as part of an effort to reignite the studio's short film series, which had been put on standby in order to focus on the creation of television commercials as well as the studio's first feature film, which would become the first-ever full-length computer-animated film, Toy Story. A dedicated research and development team worked alongside the filmmakers to devise ways to get around the burdens of animating a human character, leading to an in-house computer simulation to mimic the natural movement of clothing on a character. Subdivision surface modeling, a technique partly pioneered by Edwin Catmull in 1978 but mostly ignored in favor of NURBS surfaces, was used to bestow natural movement and realistic skin textures on the human character himself. Geri's Game premiered on November 24, 1997, winning an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film the following year. It was later shown with the theatrical release of Pixar's second feature film, A Bug's Life, the following year, and therefore became part of a Pixar tradition of pairing shorts with feature films. Plot In an empty urban park, the title character, Geri, blows the leaves off a table and sets up a chessboard. He proceeds to play a chess game against himself, playing the parts of both participants by moving to opposite sides of the board and either removing or replacing his glasses. The "player" without the glasses, and playing as black, is aggressive and confident, while the "player" with the glasses who plays white is timid and makes several mistakes. The camera work eventually makes it look like two people are actually playing the game, even showing “black” Geri’s hand and “white” Geri’s body in the same frame. The confident player soon captures all the timid player's pieces except the King - the timid player fakes a heart attack and falls to the ground, startling the other, who quickly starts to take his own pulse.