First look: Pixarâs short film Bao is your Incredibles 2 appetizer
Before Elastigirl saves her family, another mom tends to a different kind of baby in Pixarâs new short film, Bao, debuting in front of the animated superhero sequel on June 15. The seven-and-a-half-minute short is a culinary fable about a Chinese-Canadian woman suffering from the depression of an empty nest, who gets a second shot at motherhood when one of her handmade dumplings comes alive.
Domee Shi, a storyboard artist who, with Bao, becomes Pixarâs first female short director in the studioâs history, was inspired to write and tell a story flavored by her upbringing as the only child to Chinese immigrants. âOften times it felt like my mom would treat me like a precious little dumpling, wanting to make sure I was safe, that I didnât go out late, all that stuff,â Shi tells EW. âI just wanted to create this magical, modern-day fairy tale, kind of like a Chinese Gingerbread Man story. The word âbaoâ actually means two things in Chinese: Said one way, it means steamed bun. Said another, it means something precious. A treasure.â
The double meaning works wonders, as Bao tracks the lengths a mother will go to protect her child, even as she watches her sweet baby grow sour. (âWhat is puberty for a dumpling?â Shi opines. The answer: sesame seeds.) Itâs purely coincidental that the coming-of-dough short ended up slated to run in front of Incredibles 2, which also explores maternal themes by centering its focus on Holly Hunterâs character Helen, but itâs no accident that Bao feels so personal and familial. When word of the story got around Pixar after Shi presented concept images at a studio-wide meeting, employees with Asian and immigrant parents contacted Shi and producer Becky Neiman-Cobb, eager to work on the film (a mirror of what happened with last yearâs Mexico-feting Coco, which received similar enthusiasm from Pixarâs Latinx community). âIt felt like a really universally appealing story that a lot of people could identify with,â says Shi. âWe got a ton of e-mails from people identifying with the mom character, or the dumpling character, saying, âWait, thatâs me,â or âThatâs my parents,â or âIâm dealing with this right now.ââ
Another willing volunteer: Shiâs mother, Ningsha Zhong â a âdumpling master,â her daughter raves â served as a cultural consultant and gave the crew two close-up, hands-on dumpling-making demos which the animators studied intimately. âOur technical directors and special effects team put the camera super close to her hands and recorded every single little detail of how she folded the dough, how she cut each piece, how she rolled each wrapper into that perfect little bun shape,â Shi recalls. âWe [basically] recreated those shots with her hands and used them as the reference for animation.â
Itâs also whatâs on the inside that counts. While the exterior design of Dumpling was an exercise in adorable (see: the exclusive concept art above), crew members who also worked on 2007âs Ratatouille warned the Bao team that designing food would be no cakewalk. âYou know Pixar and you know the special effects we can pull off here: explosions and water and splashes and fire and fireworks,â says Neiman-Cobb. âOne of the biggest challenges, and what brought our effects department to their knees, was Dumplingâs pork filling. That was hard. We learned thereâs a very fine line between looking delicious and appetizing and looking wrong or gross. Making our food look delicious was a big triumph.â
One could argue that perhaps the filmmakers even did their job too well. âWe did a lot of âresearchâ and ate so many buns,â Shi says, âand as soon as I felt like I couldnât eat another dumpling, I would go to a Bao review, watch a shot of the dumplings being made, and be like, âOh my God⌠Iâm hungry again.ââ
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