Parents who saw Finding Dory with their children will already be familiar with Piper.
The cute fella appeared as the star of his own five-minute short film as a lead-in to the hit animated feature.
But with the release of Finding Dory on DVD, the hungry sandpiper hatchling is finding a whole new audience online – and the Internet is eating him up!
The clip below opens with Piper being taught by his mum to hunt for food (bivalves) on the shoreline, but he gets engulfed by a wave and is left traumatised by the experience.
We won’t spoil what happens next, but don’t fret, there is most definitely a happy ending.
#Pixar — Le court-métrage ‘Piper’ rien que pour vous ❤️ (à RT sans modération) pic.twitter.com/tWaavG4rk1
— Le Cinéphile Anonyme (@CinephilAnonyme) November 1, 2016
Directed by Alan Barillaro, who was the supervising animator on Oscar-winning WALL-E and Brave, Piper started as an animation test and was developed over three years.
Its creator was inspired by the sandpipers he would see on his morning runs and the hermit crabs his children would discover on the beach.
After months of studying migration tides and sandpipers along the California coast, Alan knew the key was to avoid humanising his creatures. Instead it is all told with chirps.
“I’ll never forget being in [Andrew Stanton’s] office and him handing me the script for Wall-E,and reading act one and seeing there’s no dialogue,”
Alan told Vanity Fair. “Not that I’d compare this to Wall-E at all, but it gave me confidence to tackle something like Piper.”
There is already talk of an Oscar nomination in the short animation category.
