WATCH: Trevor Jimenez On Making The Short Film ‘Weekends’

When the Annie Award nominations for best animated short film were announced yesterday, just one film from the United States made the cut: Trevor Jimenez’s Weekends.

The 15-minute hand-drawn film features a young boy shuffling between the homes of his recently divorced parents. The film is grounded in Jimenez’s personal experiences growing up in a split household in 1980s Toronto, but also adds disorienting surrealistic touches to help the viewer understand the mental state of its main character.

Marking the professional short film debut of Jimenez, he developed and directed the independently-produced short over a period of nearly a decade, in between full-time work as a story artist at Pixar.

Jimenez produced the film through Pixar’s co-op program, which allows the studio’s artists to make films in their spare time using the the company’s equipment and personnel. Prior shorts that have been produced through the program include Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi’s The Dam Keeper and Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj’s Borrowed Time, both of which were nominated for Academy Awards.

Jimenez sat down with Cartoon Brew last June at the Annecy animation festival in France to discuss the creative process of developing the film and balancing its production while working a full-time industry job.