2017 Academy Award Best Animated Short Film. Henry tackles Pixar's delightful short film, Piper (available on Disney+).
[00:00:00] 38. Let's get to the 2017 Academy Award winner for Best Animated Short Film, which is Pixar's Piper. It's written and directed by Alan Borrelio. No cast because it is just about a bird. There's no dialogue or anything. The synopsis is
[00:00:22] a hungry sandpiper hatchling ventures from her nest for the first time to dig food by the shoreline. The problem is the food is buried in the sand where scary waves roll up. So I think I saw this one for the first time maybe two or three
[00:00:37] years after it came out. I remember it winning the Academy Award but forgot about it after that. And as I said on one of the last dailies, I prefer animated short films as opposed to live-action for whatever reason. That's just personal
[00:00:51] taste and I really like Pixar short films. I think there's good charm there. There's good fun and it shows you how much emotion and care can be put into just a few minutes of film. You know, like it can get you to care about a bird
[00:01:04] like in this. It can get you to care about this or that in just a few minutes time. So that alone is impressive and not say live-action films can't do that but I just have that soft spot for animation. And of all the recent Pixar short films
[00:01:18] this is probably my favorite that I can think of. It is very classic Pixar in terms of that charm, the care for an innocent creature or person or whatever it might be and you immediately getting latched on to caring about that
[00:01:37] character. And in this it's very simple. There's just this young bird who goes over to the ocean shoreline and gets hit by waves and comes back and is scared and then she ends up pushing through a wave like burying herself in the sand
[00:01:51] and surviving and being proud of herself. So it's very simple, easy storytelling but it's done very well. It's very enjoyable, very quick and brief. It's only a few minutes long. Looks amazing and probably the best part visually is like
[00:02:07] I was just saying when she burrows herself in the ocean floor sediment and the wave hits her and then she opens her eyes and there's this other animal in there with her and they're both looking at the ocean underwater and like the
[00:02:20] sediment is rising and flowing around. Like it looks amazing, it's gorgeous. So it's a good movie if you are curious about short films or animated short films this is a good one to start with I guess. It's on Disney Plus as are all the
[00:02:32] Disney or Pixar shorts so give it a look. You could definitely kill a few minutes by checking this one out and some of the others because there is a lot of great art there even though it is only a few minutes long. So that one is a heavy
[00:02:48] four out of five.