This short film tells an astutely humorous story of what can happen, when incongruous partners come together.

The latest short film by Pixar Animation Studios, "For The Birds", is a story about a flock of small birds perched on a telephone wire and a larger bird that tries to join them. The unwelcome bird upsets the flock until they decide to get rid of him.
"For The Birds" was written, storyboarded, and directed by Ralph Eggleston, the art director for Toy Story, Pixar's first feature film, and produced by Karen Dufilho, head of Pixar's shorts department and producer of Geri's Game.
The characters and scenes in "For The Birds" were modeled with Alias-Wavefront's Maya and articulated with Pixar's proprietary modeling tools. The 15 little birds in the short film are all the exact same model, except for minor variations in the coloring and scratches on their beaks. The biggest technical challenges with this film came in making the contacts between the birds look real as well as animating the feathers. These challenges required the development of some new tools. To address the contact issue, Bill Wise, Supervising Technical Director, created bendable, disc-shaped collision detection widgets he called "contact pads." These made the bodies of the birds realistically change shape as needed throughout the sequences.
The film's 50 shots were then animated by 15 animators. Some of these animators were assigned shots rather than characters. They created several layers of animation for the acting poses of the birds, facial animation, secondary animation, the contact between birds, the feathers, and the wire. These animators used Pixar's proprietary animation software, Menv, to create their work. Animating the feathers, while the final step, was also the second technical challenge. The geometric complexity of the feathers made the bird models very slow and difficult to load into memory. This meant that the birds were very sluggish to animate and could only be loaded one or two at a time. To help animators with this problem, several weeks were devoted to optimizing the models and to adding controls to only load a subset of the feathers. Additionally, macro controls were created which enabled animators to animate individual feathers or groups of feathers. The macro controls could move the feathers up or down and could shuffle or puff them. This was an important tool as each bird contains a total of 2873 feathers which all needed to be animated.
"For The Birds" won the 2000 ASIFA-Hollywood Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement in An Animated Short as well as several other awards from film festivals throughout the world. Pixar continues their tradition of creating short films that explore the creative and technical possibilities of animation.