"Knick Knack" premiered at the 1989 SIGGRAPH in Boston. It was one of the last pieces of animation that Lasseter would animate personally during Pixar's years as an independent company. In 1990, it won the Best Short Film award at the Seattle International Film Festival. When Lasseter presented it at the London Film Festival in 1991, "The Independent" of London called it "a four-minute masterpiece" and "The Guardian" hailed Lasseter as "probably the closest thing to God that has ever graced the electronic images community." In 2001, Terry Gilliam selected it as one of the ten best animated films of all time. After "Knick Knack", Pixar took a break from animated shorts and re-focused on animating television commercials to build income and hire new animators.