Entertainment Weekly has just unveiled the concept art and synopsis for Pixar’s latest short film, “Piper”, which is attached to Finding Dory.
Piper, a baby sandpiper, learns to overcome her fear of the water in this short directed by Alan Barillaro. Inspiration for the short came from real world observations, as Barillaro noticed birds feeding at the water’s edge while simultaneously flying away from the waves.
“Seeing the way these sandpipers react to waves and run, I always felt, ‘Gosh, that’s a film, that’s a character.’ 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.”
Barillaro was encouraged to raise the stakes on the story by Dory‘s director Andrew Stanton, as well as John Lasseter. Piper will learn about the food chain as well as some other lessons from another child, a hermit crab.
Piper is obviously adorable, and we can’t wait to meet the other characters. Pixar continues to expand their animation software, and as Dory looks to be absolutely visually splendid, we can guess the ocean in “Piper” will be just as gorgeous.
Pixar’s short films rarely match the themes in the full length features they accompany, so it’s rather nice that “Piper” and Finding Dory have similar locations.
You can “sea” both on June 17th.
