Luxo Jr. – Pixar’s first Official Short

Do you know Luxo? That’s the bigger version of the popular hopping lamp you see on Pixar movies and logos. The smaller version is Luxo Jr. – both were conceptualized in 1986. I suddenly remembered in 2001 hubby also did a 3D rendering of a lamp inspired by Pixar when he was starting to learn Studiomax.

So this is a short (short for short film ^_^) that features Luxo, a lamp on a desk along with Luxo Jr., a smaller  version. Luxo Jr. was playing with a rubber ball, the one we often see in Pixar movies particularly Toy Story and Monster Inc. – the one with red stars in it. At first, the two were playing roll with the ball and Luxo Jr. is not seen on screen. When he appears it is to fetch the ball that has rolled by Luxo…he then brings it back and tries to balance only to deflate it later on. Luxo Jr. hops out of the screen again and Luxo appeared surprise when a bigger ball rolled by him.

The short was made to showcase what Pixar can do regarding animation. Luxo Jr. is technically the first Pixar short film as The adventures of Andre and Wally B. was released under Lucasfilm but both were created by John Lasseter.

Graphic-wise, the short shows the use of shadow mapping, clearly the objects appearing as the lamps light on it would appear in light. Anything behind would be in shadow or depending on how Luxo and Luxo Jr. moves, the shadows were placed accordingly. Since the two are moving, they were presumed to have limbs and the movements were done with ease. Notice also the power cords as they move when Luxo Jr. hops.

Interestingly, Luxo although spelled lukso in my mother language means jump or hop. I searched if it would mean the same in Spanish since the words are often close to my mother tongue but jump in Spanish is salto while luxo means luxury in Portuguese. Turns out that the lamps were inspired by John Lasseter’s own Luxo brand task light on his desk.