This weekend, The Good Dinosaur will hit theaters, which marks the first time Pixar has released two feature films in the same calendar year... But even with a 100-minute run time, The Good Dinosaur doesn’t leave as much of an impact as Sanjay’s Super Team, the six-minute, dialogue-free short that plays before the feature.
Sanjay will go down as one of the studio’s best, in league with classics like Presto, Partly Cloudy, and Day & Night. But unlike those shorts, which are generally either slapstick montages or fantastical scenarios, this one has its roots in, as the opening title card states, “a mostly true story.” For the first time in the studio’s history, it has produced a short film inspired by true events, and the result is Pixar’s most achingly personal film, one that finally opens the door for better diverse representation within and behind the scenes of its films.
Director Sanjay Patel had long struggled with the fact that his love of comics, cartoons, and art stood in contrast to his father’s devout Hindu traditions—it wasn’t until he was 35 that he finally read mythic texts like the epic Ramayana. But once he did, Patel found an outlet, drawing his own limited-run books and bringing them to the annual Alternative Press Expo in the Bay Area; he eventually published books like The Little Book of Hindu Deities and an adaptation of Ramayana.
