Pixar releases Fruit & Nut, a handmade stop-motion artist short and only its second stop-motion film after Self

Pixar Animation Studios published Fruit & Nut, a seven-minute stop-motion short, in full on its YouTube channel on 2 October 2026. Pixar story artists Rej Bourdages and Tony Maki wrote and directed it, and Paige Johnstone produced. FirstShowing reports that it was made through Pixar's internal Pixar Labs programme as part of a new artist-short series. Pixar bills that series on YouTube as "Pixar Artist Short Film", and both Creative Bloq and DTVA News describe it as a successor to SparkShorts.

Pixar's own introduction calls it "the legend of the first peanut butter and jelly sandwich". FirstShowing describes a strawberry and a broke peanut on a reckless spree that openly borrows from Thelma & Louise. Creative Bloq describes the production as handcrafted stop motion with physical puppets and sets, combined with 2D animation sequences, which gives it an indie look far from the studio's CG house style.

It is only the second stop-motion film Pixar has released. The first was the 2024 short Self, which this database catalogues as a stop-motion/CGI hybrid made with Tippett Studio. Taken together, the two shorts show a CG studio using its short-film slot to let artists work in physical media, each one choosing a different partner technique to put alongside the stop-motion footage.