Sanjay's Super Team: New trailer of Pixar short film on Hindu deities is a must watch

As a child growing up in India, there were countless times when The Flintstones and The Jetsons had to take a back seat to puja time at home. So it comes as no surprise that Pixar’s new animated film Sanjay’s Super Team tackles the same issues faced by countless American-Indian children growing up in the US in the 1980’s. Indian parents trying to preserve their Indian culture on foreign shores while the kids try hard to fit in with their American counterparts.

It is that exact struggle to combine both cultures that Disney-Pixar bring to life in his 7-minute short  called  Sanjay’s Super Team.  

The story begins with a scene where Sanjay’s dad performs his daily puja (or worship) at the home altar expecting his son to pray with him. Sanjay however has other plans, and would rather spend his morning watching cartoons. We’ve all been there haven’t we?

To entice viewers for the short, Pixar has released a clip, which only 38 seconds long doesn’t show very much, but it also has enough drama and dialogue-less storytelling to convince us that it’s sure to surpass Disney’s earlier  Lava .

The project is the first Pixar film to be helmed by an Indian-American director, Sanjay Patel, and was inspired by his own childhood experiences.

“As a kid, I accepted these practices and references, but didn’t understand them, and was often frustrated by them. All I really wanted to do was watch cartoons,” Patel wrote in a 2010 blog for The Huffington Post.

“If I could, I would go back to the 1980s and give my younger self this short,” Patel told The Los Angeles Times in April. “I want to normalize and bring a young brown boy’s story to the pop culture zeitgeist. To have a broad audience like Pixar’s see this… it is a big deal. I’m so excited about that.”

And so are we.

Watch the short film trailer here: