Knick Knack

Knick Knack is a 1989 American computeranimated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The short is about a snow globe snowman who wants to join the other travel souvenirs in a summer themed party. However, the glass dome that surrounds him prevents him from doing so, thus leading to his many attempts to break out of his snow globe. Knick Knack is Pixars fourth and final short produced during the companys tenure as a hardware company.

On a bookshelf filled with summer vacationthemed souvenirs, a snowman named Knick who is the cousin of Frosty the Snowman, according to the audio commentary, who resides in a snow globe, wants to reach a Sunny Miami knick knack that shows a girl lounging in a blue bikini. Knick tries several unsuccessful methods to exit the globe ramming it with the igloo backdrop, using a hammer and his carrot nose to chisel through, attacking it with a jackhammer, using a cutting torch and detonating explosives. As the globe eventually falls over the shelfs edge, Knick notices an emergency exit in the base and frees himself just before he and the globe fall into a fishbowl. Here Knick sees a pretty mermaid souvenir from Sunny Atlantis and runs toward her, but before he can reach her, the globe settles to the bottom and traps him for the second time, leaving Knick frustrated.In 1988, Pixar witnessed an unprecedented success with its third short film, Tin Toy, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. The short was the first computeranimated film to claim the award, representing an important milestone in the history of the relatively new medium. It was also the first win for the hardware company, which was still struggling to sell its main product the Pixar Image Computer. The key animator and director behind Tin Toy, John Lasseter, had once worked at Disney several years prior but was fired by unknowingly stepping on his superiors toes with his support for computer animation. Now, Disney took notice of the Oscar win for Tin Toy and began a campaign to win Lasseter back. ........

Source: Wikipedia