One of the many small pleasures of going to see a new Pixar movie is watching the shorts they put on before the main attraction. This year's Finding Dory will be no different, as Entertainment Weekly has revealed the coincidentally beach-based subject of the company's latest little 'un, Piper.
Directed by Pixar animator Alan Barillaro, the short will follow the eponymous sandpiper who has to overcome a fear of the water in order to find food. It all springs from Barillaro's exercise routine of running on the shores near the company HQ and spotting the birds' behaviour. “Seeing the way these sandpipers react to waves and run, I always felt, ‘Gosh, that’s a film, that’s a character,” says Barillaro. “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.”
He started working on the idea initially as part of a test for new ideas and technology, but Finding Dory director Andrew Stanton, who has served as Barillo's mentor during work on Finding Nemo, A Bug's Life and more), thought it could be more. “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.”
And that story will see the young Piper learning a few lessons from unexpected places, including a hermit crab. “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.”
Piper will arrive attached to Finding Dory when the film hits here on July 29. For more on Dory's aquatic characters, head here.