Last year, Disney premiered Prep & Landing, a half-hour television special about an elite unit of Santa’s Elves known as Prep & Landing.

Walt Disney Animation Studios is planning to bring the unit back in a 7-minute animated short called Prep & Landing: Operation: Secret Santa, with Betty White as the voice of Mrs. Claus.

Prep & Landing: Operation: Secret Santa will air on Tuesday, December 7, 2010 (8:00-9:00 p.m., ET) during the holiday classic A Charlie Brown Christmas. Both programs will repeat on Thursday, December 16 from 8:00-9:00 p.m., ET.

The original Prep & Landing was the first television special produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and premiered last December.

Aside from being from Disney, which is enough right there to get me to check it out, the original Christmas special also had Dave Foley as the voice of Wayne, one of the elite elves, and Foley is back for this new adventure! I totally loved the first Prep & Landing and was hoping by now it would be out on DVD, as I think it’s a great holiday story that I’d love to see every year. I actually still have it saved on my DVR (luckily!), and have watched it a few times already, so I’m really looking forward to this follow-up. I only wish it was longer than just 7 minutes.

Toy Story 2
Special Edition Blu-ray/DVD Combo
Directed by John Lasseter
Starring Tim Allen, Tom Hanks, Joan Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Don Rickles
Walt Disney Home Entertainment
Release Date: March 23, 2010

Toy Story 2 had a lot to live up to. The original Toy Story was an instant hit both critically and commercially. It’s success started PIxar down the path of awesomeness that would eventually lead to nine other formidable films that I still cherish. So the question is, how would they follow up such a massive hit? With more of the same, as it turns out.

Where the first film focused on Buzz Lightyear more and was really his story, the sequel gives a similar treatment for our favorite cowboy, Woody. Woody’s friend and owner Andy heads off to cowboy camp leaving his toys to their own devices. Things shift into high gear when an obsessive toy collector named Al McWhiggin (owner of Al’s Toy Barn) kidnaps Woody. At Al’s apartment, Woody discovers that he is a highly valued collectible from a 1950s TV show called Woody’s Roundup, and he meets the other prized toys from that show, Jessie the Cowgirl, Bullseye the Horse, and Stinky Pete the Prospector. Back at the scene of the crime, Buzz Lightyear and the other toys from Andy’s room — Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, Rex, and Hamm — spring into action to rescue their pal from winding up as a museum piece. The toys get into one predicament after another in their daring race to get Woody before Andy returns.

Toy Story
Two Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo
Directed by John Lasseter
Starring Tim Allen, Tom Hanks, Annie Potts, John Ratzenberger, Don Rickles
Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment
Release Date: March 23, 2010

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a huge Pixar fanatic, drooling over their annual releases at my local cinema like a kid in a candy shop. They continually amaze me with their ability to put out what I think are the best films released every year. For this reason, Toy Story holds a special place in my Pixar-loving heart as “˜the one that started it all.’

The film is significant for a couple reasons. It was the first full-length CGI feature (breaking new ground for the quality of computer-generated animation in general). It was also the movie that all other Pixar releases built upon and without the success of the first Toy Story, things might have gone very different for Pixar and the full-length CG animated films we see today that are so abundant. On a sadder note, you can probably trace the death of 2D hand-drawn animation back to the success of Toy Story.

The film astounds on a number of levels. It astounds on a technical level — the movie occupied the attention of a bank of 300 powerful Sun microprocessors, the fastest models around (in 1995), which took about 800,000 hours of computing time to achieve this and other scenes — at 2 to 15 hours per frame. Each frame required as much as 300 MBs of information! To put you in the mindset of early to mid 90’s computing, this was a time of one-gigabyte hard drives, which would give you about three frames, or an eighth of a second of screen time.

Back in April 2008, Disney announced their schedule of titles through 2012 for new animated features and King of the Elves, which is based on a fantasy short story by Philip K. Dick, was included on that list. At that time, the only details was a brief synopsis of the film, which centers on an ordinary elderly man who reluctantly becomes the leader of a band of elves attempting to escape from an evil troll. But early last month, I noticed that the Disney Animation site had added King of the Elves to their “Projects” area, along with a very Lord of the Rings-like title treatment (see it here at top).

Now, /Film noticed that the CG-animated film, which is slated for a Christmas 2012 release in Disney Digital 3D, has been taken down from the upcoming Projects area (though the film-specific page is still on the site, you just can’t navigate to it anymore).

A Bug’s Life
Blu-ray Edition
Directed by John Lasseter & Andrew Stanton
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Dave Foley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Denis Leary, Madeline Kahn, Phyllis Diller, John Ratzenberger
Walt Disney Home Entertainment
Release Date: May 19, 2009

On November 25, 1998, Walt Disney Pictures and the budding Pixar Animation Studio put out their second feature-length computer-animated motion picture after the classic Toy Story, and this movie was called A Bug’s Life. When it came out, the movie cost only $60 million to make, and pulled in over $350 million at the in box office, which was an amazing feat, seconded only by Toy Story‘s $30 million budget and over $350 million box office take. Even with these impressive numbers, Pixar still fought through many troubled times before really taking off and never looking back.

Since then, eight more Pixar movies have been released, and as we all know, they have all been brilliant. Pixar is now majorly considered to be completely fail-proof — and all of this started with the first couple of Toy Story movies and A Bug’s Life.

A Bug’s Life tells the story of a colony of ants who have collected a pile of food in order to pay off a bigger, more-dangerous group of grasshoppers lead by Hopper (Kevin Spacey) who demand payment from the little ants. The colony’s wannabe inventor Flik (Dave Foley), however, uses his latest invention to disastrously lose the entire pile of food into the river, which in-turn angers the grasshoppers, who in-turn demand another pile of food double the size of the initial rations. This would leave the ants without any food at all for themselves for the winter, so they banish Flik for his actions. Eventually, he convinces the Queen (Phyllis Diller) and the Princess (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) to allow him to venture off to Bug City and find the biggest, baddest group of bugs to stand up to the grasshoppers and get rid of them forever. Unfortunately, the bugs he finds may not be quite what they hoped for.