AnimationWorld Magazine — November 6, 2018
Within a Dream: Bringing Emotion To Trevor Jimenez’s ‘Weekends’
The story of a young boy shuffling between the homes of his recently divorced parents over the course of a year, the painterly short film Weekends blends surreal, dream-like moments with the domestic realities of a fragmented family in this hand-animated dialogue-free film set in 1980’s Toronto.
Weekends is written and directed by Canadian-born filmmaker Trevor Jimenez, who — working closely with production designer Chris Sasaki — oversaw a crew of 27 animators and artists to bring the project to life. Generating awards season buzz on the festival circuit, the 15-minute short film won both the Special Jury Prize and Audience Award at this year’s Annecy Festival, and topped two other Oscar-qualifying festivals, the Nashville Film Festival and the Warsaw Film Festival, in addition to a slew of other awards.
Jimenez has worked as a story artist for more than 10 years, most notably at Pixar, Cinderbiter, Disney Feature Animation, Illumination Entertainment and Blue Sky Studios. His student film Key Lime Pie screened at numerous international festivals including Annecy, Ottawa, AFI Fest, Zagreb, and Mike Judge’s “The Animation Show vol. 4,” and won the award for best animated short at AFI Dallas 2008. He is currently employed in the story department at Pixar, where he is working on the as-yet untitled forthcoming feature from Pete Docter, while also pursuing his own creative projects.
The film was produced as part of Pixar’s co-op program, which allows employees to use Pixar resources to produce independent films, but without full-fledged studio support. The program has already yielded short films such as Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi’s The Dam Keeper (2014) and Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj’s Borrowed Time (2015), both of which received Oscar nominations.