Lifted (2006)

Lifted arrives from 2006, a Pixar short of modest ambition and impeccable craft, in which a teenage alien named Stu fumbles an abduction under the withering gaze of an examiner named Mr. B. The premise is borrowed from silent comedy, the staging from Metropolis, and the whole thing runs on the physics of a sleeping farmer being bounced off bedroom walls like a pinball. There is barely any dialogue. There is no thesis. A man is dragged through a window and dropped into a crater. That is the entire moral universe on offer, and it is sufficient.

For the purposes of cultural classification, this is barren ground. The cast consists of two green animated figures and one unconscious human, which leaves no room for casting decisions of any social significance. Gender, race, sexuality, economics, the environment: none of these have been invited onto the spacecraft. Stu's incompetence is a running gag about a bad employee, not a portrait of a condition deserving accommodation. The farmer's body is a ragdoll at the mercy of a tractor beam, not a site of self-acceptance. Even the film's warmest gesture, Mr. B sighing and handing over the yoke, reads as exhausted mentorship, not as an argument about anything at all.

What remains is craft. Rydstrom, a sound man by trade, built the short from his own memory of operating complicated equipment while strangers took notes, and the result is a small, wordless machine that works. It lectures no one. It represents no one. It drops a farmer into a hole and lets him scream through the credits. Such restraint is worth cataloguing, if only as a control group.