Boundin' (2003)

Boundin' arrives from 2003, a Pixar short of roughly five minutes, written, directed, narrated, composed and largely performed by Bud Luckey, a story artist who evidently believed in doing things himself. A lamb of remarkable wool dances on a high desert plain for the amusement of assorted wildlife. The shearers come. The wool goes. The other animals laugh at his naked, spindly frame, and his confidence departs with the fleece. A jackalope appears, delivers a song about bounding instead of dancing, and the lamb recovers his joy. The wool returns in winter, is taken again, and the lamb remains unshaken.

This is a fable about resilience, and it is content to remain one. The cast is a single voice, the setting a plain, the conflict a haircut and a bruised ego. We searched the thing for contemporary signifiers and found the cupboard bare. No demographic arithmetic governs the casting, because there is one actor and he is voicing a sheep. The animals are not coded, the shearing is not an allegory of extraction, and the desert is not a cautionary landscape. The moral, that inner worth outlasts outer circumstance, is old enough to have grandchildren. It is delivered gently, by a banjo, which is not a lecture.

The short was nominated for an Academy Award and won an Annie, which tells us the industry admired the craft and not the politics. It preceded The Incredibles in theaters, a superhero feature it in no way resembles. To classify it now is to classify a nursery rhyme. The progressive apparatus finds nothing to grip. There is no sermon here, no accounting of identities, no instruction on how to live. There is a lamb, a jackalope, and a lesson about getting up. The sommelier tastes and sets down the glass.