Quite often filmmakers take on a short film only to find that after it’s finished there is so much more to say. Shane Acker worked for years to finish his 11-minute short 9 in 2004. And when it was released, audiences and filmmakers paid attention: it was invited to festivals around the world; it received a Academy Award nomination in the Best Animated Short Film category; and it got watched by two directors––Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov––who would soon step up to produce a feature film version of 9. What sold these directors and others on making a feature, beyond Acker’s obvious talent, was the wondrous universe he’d created, a world that begged to be bigger than 11 minutes. Bekmambetov remembers, “Shane’s short hooked me, so I wanted to hear the end of the story – and what happened before.” Film writer and programmer Mike Plante looks at a range of other short films whose universes couldn’t be contained by anything less that a feature-length format.