If you've played Mei in Overwatch, you know the Chinese climatologist has a thing for cold weather. Her story page on the official site doesn't give too many details on her origin, other than she was the sole survivor of Ecopoint Antarctica, and she was determined to find out what was happening with the Earth's crazy changing weather patterns. However, a new animated short from the stellar Blizzard animation team, finally gives us more background and an empathy for why Mei is the way she is.

Supplies for the polar station are dwindling and her team is forced to go into cryostasis, to be revived when an alert happens or an Overwatch team comes to assist them. Unfortunately, an alert doesn't come for more than nine years, and Mei awakes to find she is alone after malfunctions to the stasis chambers of the rest of her team. Accompanied by her mechanical pal Snowball, she embarks on a journey to fix communications, rejoin the remnants of Overwatch, and carry on her research.

The 10-minute animated short is both illuminating and poignant, and is just another example that Blizzard is missing the boat on creating a animated films for its franchises. As with its other animated shorts for Overwatch, its cinematic trailers for World of Warcraft and its just released musical short for Hearthstone, Blizzard continues to prove it has the artistic chops to compete with Disney and Pixar on the animation front. We can only hope that have something bigger planned.