Pixar’s Newest Short Film, PIPER, is One of Their Best Yet

Pixar has been making short films since 1984, long before the company evolved into the animation studio powerhouse it’s known as today. Two of those shorts have won Academy Awards, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see their newest short add one more statue to the company’s shelves.

It’s called Piper, and it’s one of the best movies to come out of the studio in years (and that’s including feature-length projects). When I attended a press junket in Monterey, California to learn about Pixar’s upcoming feature Finding Dory, Piper director Alan Barillaro showed off a version of the film that seemed mostly finished except for the original score, which still needed to be added.

The title refers to sandpipers, those little birds at the beach that dig in the sand for food before darting out of the way of oncoming waves on the shore. The story involves an adorable little sandpiper (pictured above, via EW), and in typical Pixar fashion, it learns a valuable lesson about overcoming its fear and embracing the aspect of its personality that makes it unique. It’s a gorgeous piece of work, and while the short was definitely “cute” in the traditional sense, I thought it managed to avoid falling into the “cutesy” territory that made Lava so cheesy.

Barillaro spoke to us about how this film’s development diverged from the traditional path at the studio:

“This was a little different from a standard Pixar short. What was different about it was we usually start with an idea, and then that goes into the development of story, and that hatches into this larger story and you pitch and work with development. In my case, I had a different idea. I’ve been at Pixar for about eighteen years, more than half of that as a lead [animator], and I had all of these ideas with tools and technology. Out of these tests and working with our software engineers, the story of Piper unfolded. From the get-go, even though I knew I was doing a lot of technical tests, I wanted to have a story, because a story always constrains our ideas and breaks it out of theory and you actually have to practically do certain things. We learned that long ago. Pixar has always had a history of innovations in shorts, where shorts take risks, and I really felt very compelled to do so with this short. I wanted to take risks and try a bunch of different things.”

Using the crow from Brave as a test model, he quickly realized that he and his team needed to get down on the level of an actual sand piper to accurately recreate their world on the big screen, so they went out to the beach with tons of different lenses and cameras trying to figure out how to make the film look like it had a documentary style to it. “What does the world feel like when you’re four inches tall?” he wondered. “We’re down there getting the cameras [situated], and there’s nothing like actually being around these birds to start affecting our type of storytelling as well as acting choices and design.”

Using the art of Norman Rockwell as inspiration, he and his team made the decision to shape and design every single blade of grass in order to serve the story and the character. The water in this film also serves as a major obstacle for the protagonist, and Barillaro took a different approach to creating that, too:

“As an animator, I can only look at things as characters, so I felt the wave was a character as well. In order to get this image, it’s very common that you’d just run a simulation of waves and time that. But to me, if the wave is a character, the timing matters [down] to the frame, as an animator. So we did something very different: we hand-animated all of the waves in animation so we could caricature the timing…we kind of ran with this idea. We caricatured everything — even bubbles. I remember when the effects department was saying, ‘Should we do the bubbles? We can do bubbles.’ And I said, ‘Everybody should do bubbles.’ Animation did bubbles — we were all in the same review room — ‘Let’s just see which bubble looks the coolest. Which one could we caricature?’ This ended up being a first, as far as I know: an animator shaping the bubbles, twelve separate sculpts that he’s built, like a sculpture, and we’re referencing that. Not only that, he would give that to the simulation technical director, and you’re seeing some effects bubbles mixed in with this, so we ended up having this beautiful collaboration of many different styles.”

His attention to detail didn’t stop at waves and grass: there were four to seven million feathers on the birds that needed to be animated, all to create the feeling that these were realistic creatures interacting with their environment in a realistic fashion. “At the end of the day, I want the audience to believe in the character and when they’re down at the beach, remember and have that reference point.” But he wasn't overly concerned with photorealism:

“It was less about photo-real and more about the believability of the world and some of the textural elements, and how we would shoot that…I always love being in a position where I’m slightly fearful of like, ‘How are we going to do this? Can we do an acting scene without using [the character’s] hands?’ You don’t go for the easy choices. It was a real fun experiment. Daunting, to say you’re going to animate feathers and hand that to animators and say, ‘Yeah, would you like to animate millions of feathers?’ but when we started seeing the results, it made us excited and it felt like we were doing something unique.”

For the first year of development, Barillaro was given the freedom to just work on the tools side of things to even see if such a story could be told using the technology available to him. (Can you imagine any other company but Pixar giving an employee free reign to just develop something with no promise that they'd get results? That would be unheard of anywhere else.) Once he cracked the story and they figured out how to bring it to life, most of the production was done in one year, with some of the animators working double duty on Finding Dory and Piper at the same time.

Thankfully, all of their hard work paid off. Piper is a wonderful short, and I can’t wait to see it with a completed score in front of Finding Dory on June 17, 2016.