As a narrative, Piper goes for a wholly straightforward "face your fears & do your best message": on a beach full of sandpipers, one little chick patiently waits for its (her? I kept thinking of it as a her) mother to come back with food, only to find that today is the say that she'll have to learn how to hunt clams on her own. The baby bird finds this nerve-wracking and confusing and difficult, and then downright apocalyptic when the waves roll in. But at the same time, it is by putting herself out in a place where she is scared and hurt that she discovers a new perspective that completely changes her relationship to the beach, and clams, and the water. It's hard to write a plot summary for a six-minute film without any spoilers, y'all.
Anyway, Piper is a tiny little fable, one whose message was a corny old cliché before there was even a cinema, but one of the privileges of short animation is relying on conventions that it explores in new ways. In this case, those new ways involve some exquisite artificial cinematography, and we'll get there in a moment, but what it especially involves is the little baby sandpiper, who is so adorably cute that it's poisonous. This is not the film for people who grouse about Pixar films being emotionally manipulative: Piper is shameless to a degree that is virtually unprecedented, making its protagonist as unbearably adorable and sweet as I think an animated character has ever been. This is, in its own way, thoroughly impressive: the highly realistic bird physiognomy has been treated with great respect by the animators, working under first-time director Alan Barillaro (a supervising animator at Pixar for many years), and their ability to carve out emotionally recognisable expressions and pantomime is quite stunning. This is not the exaggerated cartooning that lets the birds in For the Birds or the rabbit in Presto show off a wide range of slapsticky feelings; this is delicate, tiny acting, and the fact that it works so well - the fact that when the little bird looks eagerly at her mother and then holds her mouth open expectantly, it made me melt into a pool of warm goo right there in the theater - is impressive as hell.
Also impressive: the focus and precision with which the compositions are presented. This is one of Pixar's most top-to-bottom photorealistic projects since the opening act of WALL·E, and the first since that film to extensively rely on manipulations of focus and camera angle that would be impressively sophisticated in a live-action film, and which are just dazzling miracles in animation. Piper is a film told, in no small part, through the use of shallow depths of field - in part, just a way of reiterating the illusion that we're watching a real film, since anything shot on the tiny scale that Piper takes place would necessarily have shallow focus. If you're able to put a crab the size of a human baby's fingernail onscreen, big enough to register its expressions (like the bird, the crab is quite a rich actor that nonetheless looks entirely like an animal), then no, you are not going to be able to put it in deep staging also.
But the film gets something more than just verisimilitude from its focus. As a narrative, Piper is entirely about stretching out and expanding your horizons, and the cinematography emphasises that. There are a few shots with deep three-dimensional focus: those are the ones where the bird is suddenly overwhelmed by the scope and size of the world, whether in terror or in awe. Not everybody is going to notice this, of course (particularly not the children who are, in theory, the target audience, unless they are uniquely precocious), but it's the kind of thing you feel - it has the same effect of scale and sprawl on us that it does on the bird, and that kind of empathy is key to Piper's success. The film's triumph isn't just in making the most sickeningly adorable baby bird in the annals of human art; it's in managing to hook our perception to that bird so completely that we go on a rollicking emotional journey with it in just six minutes. It is as satisfying at that level as anything else I've seen in all of 2016.
9/10
In theory, you get to see Piper attached to Finding Dory in theaters, but I confess that for me, it felt more like the relationship was the other way around: I paid money to see this wonderful short, and there happened to be a satisfactory feature film as a bonus.
I posited that Piper solved the problem that The Good Dinosaur had, mainly how to create obviously cartoon characters that fit in a photorealistic background. Both birds look realistic as all hell (their feathers OMG) but yet they emote in ways that real birds clearly can't...but yet they do what sorry my mind clearly can't compute this.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, my film festival crowd responded to the short far far more than virtually any moment in Finding Dory, excluding its end credits stinger.
Finding Dory "serviceable". That doesn't sound good. Sounds like a Cars (First Cars), not a Monsters University let alone a Toy Story 3.
ReplyDeleteAtrophy- I think I mostly agree with you, but the dinosaurs were stylised so, so much more than the bird was here. I think that was an experiment that didn't play out well, rather than a problem that didn't get solved.
ReplyDeleteJ.S.- Lord, not even in the same zip code as Toy Story 3. I don't like it as much as Cars, but then I'm fonder than most people of Cars. I'd say that there's a pretty straight line of gently declining quality from Brave to Good Dinosaur to Finding Dory, with a spike down for MU and a really big spike up for Inside Out.
I feel like Finding Dory hit all the beats you expected, was very well crafted, and did absolutely nothing interesting or risky. I've happily watched Finding Nemo a few times over the years, but don't really have much interest in revisiting Finding Dory.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, Piper is just about flawless -- unbelievably gorgeous, endearing, and every single frame was used well.
Saw this opening night with a packed theater. Oh man, the laughs and sounds of sheer delight emitted from the audience during this short could have powered like 80 of those tanks from Monsters Inc. 'Unbearably adorable' is just totally right; I swear it caused me physical pain.
ReplyDeletei vote that instead of whatever sequel pixar proposes next, they instead do an hour and a half of short films.
I couldn't agree more! Piper was a marvelous short. What really stunned me into silence was the sand animation. I don't think I've ever seen sand look so good, even in a live action film.
ReplyDeleteI kept thinking of it as a him.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise: Nailed it. So good. Utterly gorgeous. And while it's obviously adorable, I would argue that the high degree of realism is precisely why its cuteness isn't "sickening," unlike so many cartoon and anime characters these days, which rely on massive twinkly eyes and pastel colors and (esp.) superhigh voices. Piper lets us respond to something that would look pretty cute in real life, and therefore doesn't feel like it's assaulting us, even if it is manipulating us in the end.
I'm probably not the first person to say this, but I wonder if Pixar is losing its interest in long forms. Like many people, I thought that the first third of WALL-E was by far the best. I thought that Up was a fine film, but the scrapbook sequence was in a whole other league than the rest of the movie. I liked Inside Out, but it seemed to struggle to maintain its central conceit (anthropomorphized emotions) over 100 minutes. Maybe Pixar could find a way to tell more stories that are between five and thirty minutes long. I wonder how they’d do with a movie that consists entirely of shorts, in the style of Fantasia.
ReplyDelete