Knick Knack  Knick Knack is a 1989 American computer-animated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The short is about a snow globe snowman who wants to join the other travel souvenirs in a summer-themed party. However, the glass dome that surrounds him prevents him from doing so, thus leading to his many attempts to break out of his snow globe. "Knick Knack" is Pixar's fourth short and the final short produced during the company's tenure as a hardware company. The short stands out from Lasseter's other early short films at Pixar in its reliance on pure comedy to drive the story. It was inspired by "Tom and Jerry", "Looney Tunes", and the work of animators Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. Lasseter and his wife, Nancy, collected snow globes and also enjoyed souvenirs from distant places and those elements made their way into the short as well. Singer Bobby McFerrin improvised the a cappella vocal jazz soundtrack to the film while watching a rough cut which was eventually left unchanged in its final edition. "Knick Knack" premiered at the 1989 SIGGRAPH convention in Boston and was presented in 3D. The short has enjoyed positive reviews since its debut, and has been screened as a part of numerous film festivals. On a bookshelf filled with vacation-themed souvenirs, a snowman named Knick (who is the cousin of Frosty the Snowman, according to the audio commentary), who resides in a Nome, Alaska snow globe, wants to reach a "Sunny Miami" knick knack that shows a pretty blonde girl in a blue bikini. Knick tries several unsuccessful methods to break out of the globe, culminating in detonating TNT explosives, which cause the globe to fall over the shelf's edge. Knick notices an emergency exit in the base and frees himself just before he and the globe fall into a fishbowl. Here Knick sees a pretty mermaid souvenir from "Sunny Atlantis" and runs toward her, but before he can reach her, the globe settles to the bottom and traps him again, much to his annoyance. In 1988, Pixar's third short film, "Tin Toy", won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, the first computer-animated film to claim the award. It was also the first win for the hardware company, which was still struggling to sell its main product: the Pixar Image Computer. The key animator and director behind "Tin Toy", John Lasseter, had once worked at Disney several years prior but was fired by unknowingly stepping on his superiors' toes with his support for computer animation.