Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Burrow’ on Disney+, A Pixar Short About Life Underground

Pixar‘s SparkShorts are a series of experimental short films. Their latest release, the six-minute-long Burrow, is a dialogue-free tale of a bunny just trying to make a home for herself (a home with a built-in disco/bathroom). Despite its short run time, it packs in a quietly charming story of ambition, cohabitation, and connection.

BURROW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A bunny emerges from her sparsely-decorated rabbit hole, ready to begin some DIY renovations. She sticks a mailbox and weathervane outside of the hole for some curb appeal, and jumps back inside to set to work on rehabbing her home.

The Gist: Our nameless bunny has small but clear ambitions for her home. Her floor plan includes her bed, a window, and plans for a bathroom/disco. Despite the fact that she doesn’t have all that much work to do, she’s armed only with a lantern and a shovel and no knowledge of how to create a proper home for herself, and as she digs, she keeps bumping into her fellow underground neighbors.

She first meets a family of moles who’ve created a solid two bedroom home complete with a gym. The mice next door have a tiny network of interconnected bedrooms for their many offspring. Both want to help our bunny develop the home of her dreams, but she prefers to work alone, and abandons her initial spot to tunnel further out and not be quite so thickly settled with her neighbors.

As she digs, she continues to encounter more neighbors: a group of frogs with an extensive underground library, a freshly-showered lizard who is unashamed of his naked body; each of them forces her to dig deeper so she can experience some peace and privacy. When she finally burrows as low as she can go, she hits the bedrock and sets off a rush of groundwater that fills her tunnel with water and makes her realize she should actually accept some help.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? A lot of Pixar shorts have a similar tone to Burrow, stories of ambition and perseverance, told via anthropomorphized tiny creatures or objects. While visually very different from the Oscar-winning Piper, the two share a theme of contented personal triumph.

Our Take: Burrow has a warm, uplifting, kind undertone to it. The most threatening animal in it, a badger who at first seems ferocious, ends up being the one creature who summons all the rest to come to the rabbit’s aid. The rabbit’s neighbors have all found their niche and are eager to help our bunny find hers, but she’s stubborn and wants to go it alone. Understandable. But the moral of this story is that accepting someone’s help is not defeat. In fact, it can lead to a richer and more rewarding experience.

Burrow was written and developed by animator Madeline Sharafian, who has said she has been inspired by Wes Anderson, and she has clearly followed his lead to build the quirky and specific world her characters inhabit. The fact that the moles built a weight room in their mole hole, and the ants seem to all be enjoying the ant-version of Le Cirque, and the hedgehogs are living their fullest quarantine-bread-baking-and-knitting life, and you only see each of these dioramas for about three seconds makes the short all the more fun to watch and spot those details. The story may be simple, but all those additional visual layers are what invests us in this underground universe.

Sex and Skin: Caution: A proudly naked amphibian takes off his bathrobe to flash the bunny. Don’t worry – he’s smoother than a Ken doll down there.

Parting Shot: Bunny admires her home from the outside. Her humble floor plan has been upgraded, and it now connects her to all the neighbors she originally tried to avoid, and it has a chimney and a garden outside the entrance in addition to the mailbox and weathervane she had originally tacked into the ground. Stick around for a button after the credits too to see our hero finally enjoying her bathroom.

Sleeper Star: I can’t get enough of that naked lizard, can you tell?

Most Pilot-y Line: As there is no dialogue, there’s not really a moment that sums up the gist of the piece succinctly, but the fact that all this bunny wants is a bathroom with a disco ball is all you need to know about her.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Burrow was set to appear ahead of Soul in theaters, but now that both are debuting directly on Disney+, it’s still well worth your six minutes. It’s sweet and charming, beautifully animated, and, as many other Pixar shorts are, full of heart.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Brooklyn. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.

Where to watch Burrow