A mother bird tries to teach her chick, Piper, how to find food on its own — facing a traumatic experience it must overcome in order to survive. The story of all of us.
Piper is a brief fable that perhaps seeks to show – us as much as children – that with a little perseverance, even through life's harshest moments, we can make it, gaining things we might never have expected to earn. Like many Disney–Pixar short films, there is far more depth here than one might expect from its very brief running time.
Technically superb, it is also an extraordinarily faithful portrayal of how birds and the ocean actually move, so much so that it seems incredible that it is not a digital rendering of real birds, clams and crabs.
Piper is a 6-minute short screened in cinemas alongside the film 'Finding Dory' (2016). It tells the story of a tiny, utterly endearing sandpiper grappling with life's first difficulties. Urged by its mother to approach the ocean, Piper sets off calmly towards the shore, unaware of the overwhelming power of those waves that moments later wash over it and, of course, give it a fright.
A short that is irresistibly adorable and at the same time utterly faithful to the real movements of these creatures. Little Piper tries to get hold of that small piece of clam that its mother leaves at the water's edge. With the threat of the sea waves continually trying to sweep the little bird away, leaving things in something of a mess.
Who hasn't been frightened by the force of something overwhelming? For Piper, that is where the matter ends — even the idea of trying to go back near the sea seems impossible.
Yet there comes a moment when life places a choice before you, with challenges and fears that must inevitably be faced.
And when the call of hunger is joined by curiosity and the desire to discover, the moment arrives for Piper to set aside its fears and try to overcome what appear to be insurmountable obstacles.
So fear steps aside, and discovery becomes magical.
Director and screenwriter Alan Barillaro (Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Monsters & Co.) has said that the idea for the short came from watching the behaviour of real sandpipers on the beach, which flee from the water every time the flow of the waves laps at the shoreline, and he wanted to draw a lesson from it. "Piper reminds me of childhood," Barillaro said. "Young people should have the chance to explore the world, and also the chance to make mistakes." The music is by Adrian Belew, long-standing member of King Crimson.
No words or dialogue were needed to communicate, with enchanting clarity, a story capable of speaking through the power of images alone.
One could linger over the details of how the filmmakers managed to capture the different shades of colour in the sand, with tones ranging from orange to brown to white, or those of the sea, which looks so real as to inspire wonder. In the background, a sonic backdrop by Adrian Belew, long-standing member of King Crimson.
It confirms that there is often something magical about Pixar's short films. Not only the attention to detail, the delicacy of the animation and the colours, but also the power of stories capable of evoking intense and lasting emotions.
The pairing with Finding Dory is also apt, given that the film too deals with the question of defying the odds stacked against you to do what is not expected — or, to put it another way, of going beyond the limits of what is naturally possible.