Pixels

Pixels is a 2010 French animated short film written and directed by Patrick Jean. It is about an invasion of New York City by classic 8-bit video game characters, such as those from Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and others. The film won "the Annecy Cristal" (le Cristal d'Annecy) for Best Short Film at the 2011 Annecy International Animated Film Festival. Plot On a Brooklyn sidewalk, a man walks over to a trash can, leaves a 1980s-era television by it, and walks away. After a few seconds, the TV suddenly powers on and an 8-bit picture of a bomb appears. When its fuse runs out, the TV screen shatters, releasing a cloud of pixels (illustrated as voxels because of the three-dimensionality of the scene). The pixels fly over to Manhattan, where it releases various characters from 1980s arcade video games. Space Invaders start to shoot downwards; on contact, the projectiles cause a delivery truck and two taxis to degenerate into pixels.