Knick Knack - Production

Production

After the headaches of animating Billy the baby in Tin Toy, Lasseter backed away from depicting human characters. The team all agreed to do something simpler that wouldn't "drive us all crazy," according to producer Ralph Guggeinheim. In a discussion with the group, Lasseter brought up famed Warner Bros. and MGM director Tex Avery, noting that his cartoons were wild and exuberant, yet not necessarily very complex. Lasseter collected snow globes and also enjoyed souvenirs from distant places; from those elements, Knick Knack—the only pure comedy among Lasseter's early short films at Pixar—began to fall into place.

The team were fans of Tom and Jerry cartoons and the work of Chuck Jones, and found the idea of cartoonish violence appealing. Animator Flip Phillips and production coordinator Deirdre Warin simultaneously hit on the idea of the snow globe falling into a fishbowl. Craig Good came up with the idea of an "iris out," a shrinking circle at the close, as a reference to Looney Tunes. A skeleton on the shelf in the short was a 3D model from an Ohio State University skeleton data set called George, though the Pixar team stretched George's arms for comic effect. Also distorted were the two female characters-the bikini-attired woman and a mermaid-whose breasts were ultra-exaggerated thanks to a technical director who was a pinup enthusiast.

The singer Bobby McFerrin created the musical soundtrack, an acapella vocal jazz track which he improvised while watching a rough cut of the film. As the rough cut ended, the placeholder credits read blah-blah-blah-blah, so he sang those words and it remained in the film's score. McFerrin did the score for free out of a belief that the film was cool to be involved with. Gary Rydstrom of Lucasfilm created the sound effects for the short.