Release and Later Re-releases
Knick Knack premiered at the 1989 SIGGRAPH in Boston. It was one of the last pieces of animation that Lasseter would animate personally during Pixar's years as an independent company. In 1990, it won the Best Short Film award at the Seattle International Film Festival. When Lasseter presented it at the London Film Festival in 1991, The Independent of London called it "a four-minute masterpiece" and The Guardian hailed Lasseter as "probably the closest thing to God that has ever graced the electronic images community." In 2001, Terry Gilliam selected it as one of the ten best animated films of all time. After Knick Knack, Pixar took a break from animated shorts and re-focused on animating television commercials to build income and hire new animators.
The film has been released in two versions, and each of these have been shown in both 3-D and 2-D. The original version was shown in 3D in 1989 at the SIGGRAPH program, and was released on the VHS and Laserdisc, Tiny Toy Stories, and also on the Toy Story deluxe CAV Laserdisc edition, both of which are now out of print. The film was completely remade for release preceding Finding Nemo (2003). This new version is preceded with the message "In 1989, six years before Toy Story, Pixar Animation Studios made this short film" followed by the modern Pixar logo. In this version, the girl on the "Miami" knick knack and the mermaid in the fish bowl now have much smaller breasts and the mermaid is now wearing a seashell bra rather than just starfish pasties. Lasseter defended the changes by saying, "It wasn’t big bad Disney coming in and insisting we do this … it was our own choice. It was just crossing the line for me personally as a father. So I made the decision to reduce breast size." This version is available on the Finding Nemo DVD set, the Pixar Short Films Collection – Volume 1 DVD and Blu-ray, and through the iTunes Store. A 3-D version of the "small breasts" edition played to the public as a short attached to the 2006 Disney Digital 3D release of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
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