Meet 'Piper' - Pixar's Upcoming Short Film by Alan Barillaro

Piper concept artwork by Jason Deamer © Pixar

With each Pixar theatrical release, audiences also receive a wonderful short film accompanying the feature film. We've experienced films like Enrico Casarosa's beautiful, La Luna, to the Oscar Winning short film, For The Birds, by Ralph Eggleston — and now we're are pleased to learn that the short released alongside Finding Dory will be Piper by director, Alan Barillaro. A long-time veteran animator who has worked alongside Finding Dory director Andrew Stanton on several films (including A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo and Wall-e)  notes, “To work with Andrew so closely over the years, it means a lot to me that I’m in front of his film,”. 

In an exclusive from Entertainment Weekly, the inspiration for the film came to director Alan Barillaro as he would run alongside the shore and notice flocks of sandpipers foraging for food between the wave cycles on the beach.

“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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