If I got to choose one short film as my favourite, this film is what I’ll choose -or maybe you could already tell that since I’ve posted so many GIFs of them on previous posts.
Paperman is a short animation film from disney that was published in 2012. Created by John Kahrs, the animator of Ratatouille (again, my all time favourite movie), Frozen, Monster Inc., and many more. In an interview with Animation World Network, director John Kahrs revealed that Paperman first materialized when he was working as an animator at Blue Sky Studios during the 1990s. During his commute through Grand Central Station, he got the inspiration by “the random connections sometimes you make with people”, and he delivered that idea beautifully.
“Every morning on my way to work I would go through Grand Central Station … and sometimes you’d meet eye to eye with people, just strangers, like a pretty girl or something, and you’d think is there a connection? You feel that connection for a split second and wonder who that person was. That’s the core idea of it – what if two people were really perfect for each other, and they had that chance meeting? And what if they were separated – how would those two people get back together again? And how could a little bit of magic and fate intervene to bring them back together?”
— Director John Kahrs on his inspiration behind Paperman.
Like most of short animation film, Paperman didn’t use any dialog and tell their story through gestures and expressions. Through the whole 6 minutes and 33 seconds this film tells a story about how George and Meg met in a brief encounter and then met each other again through the effort of George and the “universe”. What really stuck in my mind is how this animation could deliver the feeling of what I assumed as love at first sight “realistically”. Most animation movie exaggerate their characters’ expression when they encounter their one, like jaws dropping, eyes get extremely huge, etc., but with this film, it is not.