I saw Toy Story 3 tonight. It was fantastic: an imaginative, entertaining, and emotional rollercoaster of laughs, goose-bumps, action sequences and nostalgia—today’s cinema, par excellence.

But I’m entirely more interested in talking about the short film that precedes it—no, not that laser-driven attempt at restoring Max’s wicked old intro speech—I mean Day & Night, certainly the best commercially-produced short I’ve ever seen.

Pixar seems to have done well to keep it a secret until tonight, however, and there isn’t much copy material available just yet, so I’ve only posted the very short clip above to give you a feel for what I’m about to talk about. And here’s why I think it’s such a landmark piece:

First off, it’s ‘filmic’ in a way I’ve never seen before. Though I’ve been quietly working on a film that tells its story through the shape/edges of the screen itself, what Pixar has done with their 3D CGI-world(s) nested within a 2D cell animation is absolutely genius. It melds multiple layers of story/visuals/contexts/relationships into a single whole, thereby lending to the film a significant amount of both physical and figurative depth. In fact, this is one of my leading interests within the film world right now, and I’ve even recently written a paper about what I call implicate depth (following David Bohm). The major film project I’m working on this summer aims to have a lot of this in it, too.

Second—beyond its technical merits—the story and concepts that underlie Day & Night are right up my alley… so much so that I’ve removed pieces of my blog bio so as not to look like I plain stole the ideas from this film. But mystery truly is the beauty in life, and the unknown is not to be feared, it is to be reveled in until new knowledge can take its place, until new connections can be forged. Day & Night makes this point simply, powerfully, beautifully.

I can’t wait to watch it again.