UPDATED: Pixar Unveil Title and First Look for Next Short: The Blue Umbrella

For a while now, a Tumblr site, Rainy City Tales 332 (there's a Twitter account too), has been teasing us with little bits and pieces from what it soon transpired was Pixar's next short film. We managed to glean that the short would revolve around umbrellas and involve the Toy Story studio's usual penchant for animated inanimate objects and had assumed it would precede this summer's Monsters University in cinemas. But that was it. Now, The Wall Street Journal has the low-down on the short, which is called The Blue Umbrella!

WSG has a brilliant clip from the short, showing the quiet and serene pace the film strikes (in somewhat of a similar way to La Luna). Check the clip out below - although I heartily recommend watching it in HD.



Just look at the artistic diversity across Pixar's last four feature-released shorts: Day and Night, Hawaiian Vacation, La Luna and now this - no two look the same! With the magnificently beautiful animation (presumably heavily influenced from first-time director Saschka Unseld's technical background as a camera and staging artist), the touching chance-encounter love story and the great, gentle score (by ParaNorman composer Jon Brion), it's easy to notice parallels between The Blue Umbrella and Disney's acclaimed Paperman. Its rainy, somewhat more serious world also evokes thoughts of another Pixar short for me, Red's Dream.

First-time director Saschka Unseld. Follow him on Twitter here.

Unseld spoke about the concept of random parts of the film's city coming to life ("such as constructions signs and a post office mailbox"), a feeling enhanced by the newly photorealistic look achieved for the film, using the global illumination system developed for Monsters University amongst other techniques. The director said "If we made it stylized and cartoony, the magic of those things coming to life would be completely gone".

For more words from Unseld and a few from Pixar head-honcho John Lasseter, head over to the full WSJ here.

UPDATED - 07/01/2013, 20:53 (GMT): Pixar released the still that adorns the post, in hi-res, and WSJ rolled out another fantastic (lower-res) still (above), and, looking at it, it's very hard to believe that it's not a live-action shot: beautiful, just beautiful.

Check out the official synopsis too:

"It is just another evening commute until the rain starts to fall, and the city comes alive to the sound of dripping rain pipes, whistling awnings and gurgling gutters. And in the midst, two umbrellas — one blue, one not — fall eternally in love."

Via The Pixar Times and Upcoming Pixar.