Pixels (2010 film)
2010 French animated short film by Patrick Jean
Pixels is a 2010 French animated short film written and directed by Patrick Jean. It is about an invasion of New York City by classic 8-bit video game characters, such as those from Space Invaders, Pac-Man and others.
The film won "the Annecy Cristal" (le Cristal d'Annecy) for Best Short Film at the 2011 Annecy International Animated Film Festival.. The short would later be adapted into a feature length film, released in 2015.
Plot
On a Brooklyn sidewalk, a man walks over to a trash can, leaves a 1980s-era television by it and walks away. After a few seconds, the television suddenly reactivates and an 8-bit picture of a bomb appears. When its fuse runs out, the television's screen shatters and releases a cloud of pixels (illustrated as voxels because of the three-dimensionality of the scene). They fly over to Manhattan and form into various characters from arcade video games throughout the 1980s.
Space Invaders start to shoot downwards; on contact, the projectiles cause a delivery truck and a pair of taxis to degenerate into pixels. A cloud of pixels then flies down a subway station, eventually forming into Pac-Man, which devours trains and other stations as it travels through the tunnels.
“Pixels (2010 film)” enters the record as 2010 French animated short film by Patrick Jean. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pixels, film and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3389472. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2011 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pixels (2010 film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.