The blue umbrella

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Movie
German title The blue umbrella
Original title The Blue Umbrella
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2013
length 7 minutes
Age rating FSK 0
Rod
Director Saschka Unseld
script Saschka Unseld
production Marc Greenberg
for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
music Jon Brion
camera Patrick Lin
cut Jason Hudak
occupation

The blue umbrella (original title The Blue Umbrella ) is a computer animation short film by Pixar Animation Studios , which was shown in 2013 as a supporting film for The Monster University . The German director Saschka Unseld wrote the script and also directed.

action

The film is set in a big city on a rainy evening, the rain makes the inanimate objects on the street resound, people scurry along the sidewalks under their dark umbrellas.

In the crowd of gray and black umbrellas, a female red and a male blue umbrella with faces appear. When the blue umbrella, which has happily looked around and seen friendly faces in everyday objects, which it greets and admires, notices the red one, it tries to get closer to it. He smiles mischievously at him from the side and it's all over the blue umbrella, he fell in love. Not only do the owners of the umbrellas move away from each other, the blue umbrella is also caught by a huge gust of wind and carried away. Now the babbling rain gutters, gurgling gullies, mailboxes, subway shafts and construction site signs try to help him, which almost succeeds - but he is run over. Bent, sad and dirty he lies on the street.

However, his owner and the owner of the red umbrella find him and sit down in front of a café with their umbrellas open. The blue and red umbrellas enjoy their close get-together very much.

production

background

According to Unseld, a graduate of the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, he made up the story after finding a blown umbrella in San Francisco. Unseld was previously a camera and staging artist for Brave , Cars 2 and Toy Story 3 . The idea for the film came from him. It was a first for Pixar that someone from the technical field was given the artistic direction of a film. It was also rather unusual for Unseld himself, as he admitted, to pitch an idea to the development team and John Lasseter .

execution

Unseld's team photographed various inanimate objects in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago and Paris for the concept. The film uses artificial pareidolia so that the viewer can recognize faces in these objects. Pixar's rendering system has been enhanced for this film with algorithms for light and reflections that reproduce a natural street environment, an effect known as global lighting . On photorealism, John Lasseter noted that Pixar never tried to create photorealistic images. Instead, programs were used in which the viewer knew from the start that they did not exist. The Blue Umbrella represents a 180 degree departure from the usual Pixar philosophy. In addition to the simulation of the light interaction of objects and surfaces (so-called global illumination), which makes a realistic appearance possible, the animation studio also had to deal with other techniques the VFX region concerned, such as the Deep compositing .

Steve May, head of the technology department, revealed that Pixar did not have the computer capacity or the know-how to use algorithms that could have made a corresponding photorealism possible.

publication

The blue umbrella premiered on February 12, 2013 at the Berlin International Film Festival. It then ran as a supporting film for the animated film Die Monster Uni , which premiered in the USA on June 8, 2013. This took place in the presence of the German-born director Unseld and the producer Marc Greenberg.

The film was also released in Portugal, Brazil, Hungary, France, the United Kingdom, Thailand, Italy and Finland as well as in Spain, Greece, Canada, Poland, Serbia and Russia.

The film is included as an extra on the DVD of the animated film The Monster University , which was released on November 14, 2013 by Walt Disney Studio.

reception

criticism

Moviescape said the “umbrellas that gave the title” are “more classically animated”, which has a “certain charm”. The story is "calm and lives mainly through the staging and the power of the images". It also said: “Nice, but not surprising. Nice, but not heartbreaking. ”And finally,“ in the end ”,“ the grandiose optics in particular will be remembered - and the question of whether Pixar will soon see a film in a photo-realistic look ”. Rating: 8 out of 10 possible points.

The FBW , which gave the film the rating of "particularly valuable", pointed out that Pixar short films had "always convinced" with their "original ideas and their loving characters". With this film, too, “the creators manage to breathe life into an object with just a few strokes, but also personality”. In conclusion, it was said: "An enchanting and lively entertaining animation pleasure."

The website berlinale.de/Filmdatenblatt wrote that the makers of Pixar understand like no other animation artist how to "bring objects to life in order to tell emotionally thrilling stories".

Award

German Film and Media Rating (FBW)

  • 2013 Award of the film with the title "Particularly valuable"

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pixar's Blue Umbrella see digitalproduction.com
  2. ↑ a b Barbara Chai: Watch an Exclusive Clip of Pixar's New Short, 'The Blue Umbrella'. In: The Wall Street Journal. January 7, 2013, accessed August 5, 2013 .
  3. ↑ a b c “The Blue Umbrella”: New Pixar short film as photo-realistic as never before sS animationsfilme.ch
  4. ^ T. J .: The Blue Umbrella Premiers on February 12, 2013. In: Pixar Post. January 28, 2013, accessed August 5, 2013 .
  5. ↑ Pixar's “The Blue Umbrella” as world premiere at the Berlinale sS animationsfilme.ch
  6. ↑ The Blue Umbrella - OT: The Blue Umbrella (2013) at Moviescape, April 30, 2014. Retrieved November 17, 2018.
  7. ↑ The Blue Umbrella sS fbw-filmbewertung.com, accessed on 17 November 2018th
  8. ↑ The Blue Umbrella / Der Blaue Regenschirm sS berlinale.de, accessed on November 17, 2018.