Behind the Scenes: Pixar’s “The Blue Umbrella”

 

A few weeks ago we talked about Pixar’s short film “The Blue Umbrella” in order to highlight the recent rise of the animated short film. As the title suggests, the short film follows the burgeoning love story between a down-on-his-luck blue umbrella and a sexy red umbrella. Yeah, I realize that sounds kind of dumb, but it’s actually endearing.

But this time we’re not going to talk about all of the virtues of short films and how they can give smaller animation studios an opportunity to make a name for themselves. Instead, we’re going to take a close-up look at the behind-the-scenes work that led to this movie with the hopes that it will inspire you to start your next great project!

Director Saschka Unseld explained that he started with a powerful, universally-felt emotion. Unseld showed his staff a picture of a broken, drenched blue umbrella and said, “I stood there, in the rain, and felt really sad.” For Unseld, the sadness partially stemmed from nostalgic memories. Unseld grew up in Germany, where rain was as common as beer and pretzels. Unseld’s new home, San Francisco, has some of the lowest rainfall in America. Naturally, the German art director missed the rain.

Unseld pitched the idea to his boss, who absolutely loved it. He and his team set out to create an animated short film that captures the beauty and magical qualities of a place that has come alive beneath the rain.

 

From there, the design team used an arsenal of artistic tricks to create a powerful emotional impact on the audience. For example, they used soft, pitter-patter rain that’s pleasant to hear in the optimistic parts of the film before switching over into heavy, “boy am I glad I’m not outside right now” during the sad parts. They also juxtaposed two clashing blues during one of the darker scenes to create an appropriately jarring emotional response. Color and lighting played incredibly important roles in the film. Nearly everything is black or grey, except for the vibrant red and blue umbrellas.

It’s truly amazing how much emotion the team managed to convey without speaking a single world. It’s like the love story montage from Up or the first 30 minutes of Wall-E. You don’t need a lot of dialogue in order to dump a truckload of emotions onto your viewers. I mean, Up had audiences bawling without anybody uttering a word — that’s truly powerful art.

The most important lesson to take from Unseld’s creative team, I think, is that you should be willing to accept criticism and scrap your bad ideas. The anthropomorphic city characters “seemed a little creepy, watching Blue’s every move,” so the creators upgraded the spectators from “creepy” voyeurs to friendly matchmakers by helping the two umbrellas stay together.

That’s how a top-notch creative studio rolls. Are you humble enough to fundamentally change one of your favorite ideas because it doesn’t quite work? Do you use lighting and coloring techniques in every single scene to establish mood and convey emotion? If the answer is no, then you really need to step up your game! How can you ever hope to become part of a top-notch art studio like Pixar if you don’t strive to be the best of the best?