Partly Cloudy (2009)

Partly Cloudy arrived in 2009, attached to the front of Up, and it runs about six minutes. Peter Sohn wrote and directed it, drawing the premise from a childhood misreading of Dumbo: if storks deliver babies, where do storks get them. The answer, in this telling, is a stratum of clouds who sculpt infants from vapor and hand them down. Most of the clouds produce kittens and puppies and smiling human children. One gray cloud, Gus, produces crocodiles, porcupines, rams, and sharks, and his delivery stork, Peck, absorbs the damage. The film has no dialogue. It has weather instead.

The short is a wordless slapstick fable about a friendship under strain, and it carries no social program whatsoever. There are no human identity markers to speak of, since the cast is clouds and birds. There is no romance, no politics, no economic argument, no environmental sermon despite the obvious meteorological furniture. Gus's grumpiness is a temperament, not a diagnosis. The babies he makes are hazardous, not body-positive. Nothing in these six minutes gestures at the cultural conversations that would dominate the following decade. It simply wants you to laugh when the porcupine quills the bird.

We are left, then, with a small, warm, well-crafted piece of animation that predates the era of the annotated children's short. Its ambitions are comic and sentimental, and it achieves both without asking the audience to agree with anything. In the ledger of contemporary cultural markers, it is a clean sheet. A sommelier might call it a young vintage, uncomplicated, best enjoyed without a tasting note. It delivers its babies and asks nothing in return.