The latest exercise in brilliance from Pixar, “Borrowed Time,” is a Western. This may strike you as odd, especially since the Western has been declared dead too many times to count. Some say it died with CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove, a superb 1989 adaptation of the Larry McMurtry novel that beat out Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Don DeLillo’s White Noise for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1986 (yeah, I know…) starring Robert Duvall as the dude I always wanted to be when I grew up and Tommy Lee Jones as American Stoicism Personified. Others say it ended with chair whisperer and caricature-of-his-own-characters Clint Eastwood’s 1992 “revisionist Western” (yeah, I know…) Unforgiven, which is also very good and stars Eastwood (shocker) and a terrifyingly brutal Gene Hackman and a superb (if underutilized) Richard Harris and Morgan bloody Freeman and an appropriately maudlin yet expansive theme.
Obviously, the Western is not dead. The existence of flicks like Hell or High Water is proof enough of that, despite the fact that the cultural zeitgeist has moved on. Clearly superheroes are today’s cowboys: Arrow is our Bonanza, Jessica Jones is our Have Gun—Will Travel, Iron Man is our A Fistful of Dollars, etc. However, 1. people are still making Westerns and Western-influenced work (the Coens, for instance, and also check out Get Low), and 2. genres are not living things and therefore cannot die, and 3. I really, really like Westerns and refuse to acknowledge that they might be dead because John Ford is forever.
But I digress. “Borrowed Time” is a Pixar short, which is made abundantly clear by both the computer animation style and the exacting level of detail that has gone into every hair upon the nameless protagonist’s bewhiskered visage. Its origin is made less abundantly clear by its tone, which is, to put it mildly, viscerally miserable. Give or take an Up (and even that ended tied up in a pretty bow), heartbreaking survivor’s guilt over the violent loss of a loved one was totally not Pixar’s bag. Either way, you heard it here first: Dark Pixar has arrived, and Dark Pixar pulls no punches.
To be fair, my viscerally miserable reaction may well be colored by my own well-documented tragedies and aforementioned loyalty to the Western, but others were equally struck by the measured creep of reflection and despair portrayed here. You probably will be too, because this is basically the animated short film equivalent of Johnny Cash’s “Hurt.” Watch it when you’re ready for weeping. A trusty sidearm and companionable steed are optional, but recommended.
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