Disney's Oscar-Nominated Doggie Short Scampered to Life

Nestled among the big stars in the running for Oscar glory on Sunday will be a hungry little dog from Disney’s Feast, a front-runner for the Best Animated Short award. The film, which tells the story of a young man’s life through the eyes and appetite of his Boston Terrier puppy, was directed by animator Patrick Osborne.

“It’s very daunting when you first get green-lit,” Osborne told Yahoo Movies. “You realize that Disney has made 180 shorts and you’re going to sit in there somewhere, and you don’t want to be the worst one."

Osborne, who joined the company for 2008’s dog tale Bolt, and worked on the 2012 Oscar-winning short Paperman, had been working as the animation supervisor on Big Hero 6, overseeing the big huggable robot Baymax (he gave it that March of the Penguins-inspired waddle). Once studio head John Lasseter and his vaunted Story Trust of directors gave him the go-ahead, Osborne took a break from Hero to embark on what would end up being a very different-looking project.

One of Osborne’s first and most important decisions was to differentiate the dog at the center of the story from Disney’s large stable of anthropomorphized pups, from Goofy to Dug from Up to the many spotted canines of 101 Dalmatians.

"This particular character was pretty much a real dog,” he said of Feast’s feisty foodie named Winston. “It doesn’t emote that much.” After experimenting with no music at all, he settled on keeping the film’s musical score muted and kicked it up on the few occasions that the dog made decisions that would most likely transcend a normal canine’s instincts, such as turning away from delicious-looking grub in an effort to play cupid for his owner.

Osborne’s work on Big Hero 6 involved a “traditional,” high-tech computer-animated look with hyper-realistic characters that required adding on simulated hair and clothes and other layers of details to a moving figure. With Feast, however, Osborne employed a more stripped-down approach that appears hand-drawn, (although it’s also computer-animated).

Without having to worry about other artists coming in and layering on elements to the figures on which they were working, individual animators had more control over the look of the movie. “I like the connection between the actual animator and the finished work,” Osborne said. “I think that’s a very intuitive way for artists to work.” The lack of complicated layers also allowed Osborne to employ the help of several hand-drawn animators, including Dale Baer, whose work at Disney began with 1973’s Robin Hood.

After he finished Feast, Osborne went back to animate the last bits of Baymax on Big Hero 6, before touring festivals and now awards events with the short, which debuted ahead of the superhero feature. As for what’s next, Osborne — who’s also a department head — will continue to advise on Disney feature projects, though he says that doesn’t include a sequel to the smash Frozen. ”There’s nothing like that in the pipeline,” he says, though he swears that the Broadway show and the upcoming short, Frozen Fever, are in good hands; the animators who supervised Anna and Elsa are returning for both the stage show and the short film.

Even without a sequel, the process that created both a feature like Frozen and a short like Feast remains in place at Disney, where the work is more about obsessiveness to detail than any stroke of genius. “There’s no magic,” says Osborne. “And that’s the magical thing.”