Paperman Review & Interview with Producer Kristina Reed

If you’re one of the people who made Wreck-It Ralph Walt Disney Animation’s largest box-office opening ever this weekend, then you’ve already seen the magic that is Paperman. If not, I’m about to give you one more reason to rush to the theater to see the movie!

Paperman is a short- the first Disney has released before a feature film in a long time. I have to say that it was worth the wait as the short was touching, romantic, and truly ground breaking.

Paperman is a story of a man and a woman who meet very briefly and get the whole, butterflies-in-your-stomach thing. They don’t know each other & have to get to work, but they have an unmistakable moment. The man thinks about her all day at work and can’t focus. He keeps daydreaming and starts staring out his window when he realizes that she’s in the building across the way! Deciding that it’s fate and he must act, he makes a paper airplane to toss her way to get her attention. He misses, and makes plane after plane, trying to catch her eye. But soon, she leaves the building, and she still hasn’t seen him. Will she ever know that he likes her? How will he find her when he doesn’t even know her name?

The short is so sweet- and did I mention it’s completely silent? It’s only a few minutes long, and there is no dialogue, but we really get to know the characters in the short amount of time that we’re given! &Not only is the movie silent, but it’s in {mostly} black-and-white, and here’s the part that’s really groundbreaking: the animation is a combination of hand-drawn and CG!

I was thrilled that along with several other bloggers I had the chance to interview the Producer, Kristina Reed, about how this beautiful short came to be.

On the inspiration for the story:

This idea came about early on in his [John Kahrs, the Director] career. He lived in New York City, and he was working in the suburbs of New York. Everyday, he’d be traveling through Grand Central Station as a single guy in his 20’s. There’d be throngs of people moving through the train stations, and he would be thinking to himself, “Why am I not having a more happy life? I’m a single guy in New York City. I should be on top of the world. And yet I feel really rather lonely.” And every once in a while, he’d make a connection with somebody, eye contact in the station and think, “Is that the girl of my dreams?”And then she’d be gone.

On the process of combining animation techniques:

We start off with every short by storyboarding the shots. It allows us to see the camera work and what’s going to happen in the scene. The next thing we do is we set up the camera. This is when it gets into animation. We start actually timing her expression, when she’s going to open her mouth, what her eyes are going to do, and when she’s going to turn her head. We’re making sure that we can see her clearly in that moment.

And then this is where the process differs from a typical CG film. We go in and we erase her features, and we flatten the image so that it doesn’t look volumetric and CG anymore. It looks almost like we just did it in sort of flat black and white. At this point we have one of our hand drawn artists come in and design how the lines are going to work.

Just how by lifting a lip up a little bit or turning an eye, there’s so much expression that can be conveyed. And when you’re trying to do that in the CG world it’s really, really hard.  There’s a lot of different people who come in and set up the model and do the rigging inside the model and get her eyelids and her eye lashes right. And it’s very intricate and complicated. But in hand drawn work, it’s a line. And there’s just this beauty to that that neither John {the director} nor I have been exposed to.

So there’s several frames where they’re laying out different pieces, how her hair will be, where the weight of it will be, her eyebrows, where they go up. And then we figure out the paint. And this is where we decide where the highlights are going to hit her face.

And then one last step, we composite it into the scenes. We get the clouds and actual CG lighting in there. So you see the sun coming in from behind her and the whole magic effect is now in the shot. So I know you’re thinking that was tedious. But when you see the shot in the film it’s a magical moment.

On choosing a time period for the short:

He [John, the Director] knew from the very beginning that he wanted it to be in black and white. And he was very entranced by the black and white photography of New York. And the idea of these sky scrapers, and you as a human being are just sort of working your way across this sort of inhospitable landscape, surrounded by lots of people but very much alone, unless you find someone in the world that you can connect with. So we sort of talk about it as late 40’s/early 50’s New York.

On whether Disney will continue with this animation technique:

We want to play with it some more.We feel honestly like it’s somewhat our responsibility as one of the premiere in animation houses {and certainly the house that invented this art} to put new visual looks out into the world for other artists to respond to. We’re hoping that this sort of inspires other folks to come in and play with looks. We feel there’s a vast frontier out there that is not just hyper real CG, which is sort of where a lot of animation’s going right now.

When you go see Wreck-It Ralph, make sure you get to the theater early to catch Paperman!

Note: I watched this short as part of the #DisneyMoviesEvent. Disney provided my travel and accommodations to cover this event. All experiences are authentic & all opinions are my own.