Pixar reveals newest short-film cutie, PIPER

Piper is the newest addition to the string of cute short-film Pixar characters.

I remember seeing one of Pixar’s short-films for the first time, and it was titled “For the Birds.”  For me, it was the start of my admiration for the short-films that Disney/Pixar would include as a warm-up for the feature film.  And they show no signs of stopping this trend, as Entertainment Weekly has revealed Pixar’s latest short-film character, Piper.

Piper tells the tale of a baby sandpiper as it learns to overcome hydrophobia, or the fear of water.  Being that most sandpipers spend much of their time in and around water searching for food, this can be quite the conundrum.  But director Alan Barillaro found a story that needed to be told when he ran by them along a California shore one day.

“Seeing the way these sandpipers react to waves and run, I always felt, ‘Gosh, that’s a film, that’s a character,’” says Barillaro, who began toying with animation software as a personal challenge to design a non-speaking character who was afraid of the water yet had to venture into it to eat. “It’s always fun to show a world we’re familiar with but from a different perspective. We’ve all been to the beach, but have we ever viewed water from just an inch off the sand? That could be very fearful from a bird’s perspective.”

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Barillaro’s early concept work was playful and low-stakes, but his progress on Piper impressed his mentor, Dory director Andrew Stanton (whom Barillaro worked with on Nemo, A Bug’s Life, and Wall-E). “You always want to show directors, ‘Hey, are these cool tools you’d like to use to make films?’” Barillaro says. “So I showed Andrew the Piper tests thinking I was very much just showing him a test, but he kept poking at me, like, ‘It’s a cool test, but keep working on that story.’ And then John [Lasseter] did the same. There’s remarkable encouragement at Pixar that when you think of an innovative idea, don’t forget the story. It was their encouragement or else I would have stopped at the test phase.”

The story then grew, as Piper became a tale of a child learning from a parent about the way of the food chain — and a child learning from another child, as Piper encounters a small hermit crab who teaches her the way of the waves. “It’s the kid at the playground feeling,” says Barillaro. “You fall down and you feel so small, but you look and see someone even smaller than you brush themselves off and tackle something, and learn from that in your own way. It was important to me to stay in the kid world and see the world from Piper’s eyes, and not be from the human perspective.”

The story continued to grow and three years later, this 6-minute film gets the lucrative gig of premiering before for Finding Dory.  I certainly can’t wait to see this little nugget, 15 years after seeing “For the Birds,” and be just as entertained by the cuteness and beauty of Pixar’s animated shorts as I was back then.

Check out real life sandpipers along New Brunswick beach

Source: EW.com

By Molly

Molly is a proud Canadian who is currently attending university in Scotland. She loves to read, write, watch films, and talk about Sarah J. Maas books. If not snuggled up with a book, Molly can usually be found tapping at the dance studio, or writing yet another essay.