By: debbie lynn elias
As is becoming tradition with Disney•Pixar, not only do you get to see a fantastic feature, but an animated short of unparalleled excellence. Last year we were treated to the Oscar-winning Paperman. Now, paired with MONSTERS UNIVERSITY, is writer/director Saschka Unseld’s soon to be Oscar-winning THE BLUE UMBRELLA.
As Unseld himself describes it, the inspiration for THE BLUE UMBRELLA came while being in San Francisco on a rainy day. “I was walking through the city and I found a broken umbrella. It was lying in the gutter. If you’ve ever seen a broken umbrella, it just looks incredibly sad. I just thought, ‘I should tell his story and try to give him a happy end.’ The other thing is that I grew up in Germany in Hamburg so I grew up with the rain and living in California, I really missed it, so I wanted the film to be a love declaration to the rain.”
Lost in a rain storm, THE BLUE UMBRELLA finds himself alone being tossed and turned by the wind the rain, traffic and being trampled by pedestrians. As he rocks and rolls up and down the streets and sidewalks, a little red umbrella sheltering its owner from the elements, searches the skies and the ground for THE BLUE UMBRELLA who caught her eye before he was tossed to the winds.
Nuanced animation of nuts, bolts, screws, drains, gutters, cracks in pipe fittings – animating the tiniest, seemingly most insignificant hardware found on the streets, on buildings – is so charming, so clever. The detail is so meticulous as Unseld breathes life into THE BLUE UMBRELLA that he had me wondering what was coming to life next.
Beauteous, and also the most challenging aspect of the film process, is that THE BLUE UMBRELLA “looks so different than anything else out there in animation and you don’t see that until it’s done. So when you do the animation, you have to imagine what the final picture will look like. It’s incredibly hard because nothing out there looks like this [style/texture]. It took a lot of confidence and a lot of imagination for everyone to think ‘it’s not gonna be like it is now, but it’s gonna be so real and full of rain and full of sparkle and full of reflections’.”
For Executive Producer Marc Greenberg, the animation process of THE BLUE UMBRELLA “reminds you how amazing the artists are at Pixar.”
Setting the animation bar even higher, THE BLUE UMBRELLA is an emotional gem that uplifts, makes you smile, makes your eyes light up and dance and your heart take flight and soar as you watch this dance of puppy love. BLUE UMBRELLA is floating its way to Oscar gold.
Written and Directed by Saschka Unseld
