Paperman (2012): Short Film Review

Hey guys! Today I bring you another short animation film by no other than Disney! I bet a lot of you have heard of this black and white romantic short, with no dialogue as well.  A simple love story that makes you wonder about hose short moments you meet someone on the street. Even if it was a split second you shared a moment and sometimes you wonder if you might ever see each other again. I mean what would you do if you wanted to see them again? Would try to find a way or would you just brush it off as if it never happened?

I’ve even seen a version of the beginning scene but with Ron Stoppable and Kim Possible as the main protagonists; it’s ok if you feel nostalgia, we can cry together. The thing that fascinated me about this was that this short won an Oscar for Best Animation and also an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Another thing is how they mixed traditional drawing with 3D animation, combining both of these things created a masterpiece and something I’ve never seen before which really captured my attention.

The film is set around 1940s in New York City.  A young man is standing at the station waiting for the train when he sees a piece of paper float beside him and a young woman going after it. They stand next to each other, the train arrives and suddenly one of the man’s papers floats against the woman’s face. When he takes it off her face she notices her red lipstick left a lip stain on the paper to which she laughs and he laughs. Before he knows it the woman is already boarding the train. They exchange looks as the train goes away. The man then arrives to his work at an office, where his boss gives him a large stack of papers, putting them over the paper with the woman’s lip stain. When he looks out the window, he sees the woman from before on the building in front of his. He tries to call her attention but he fails, then getting an idea to make a paper plane and  throw them at her direction so she can see him. He tries many times, wasting all of the papers his boss had previously given him and he decides to use the paper with the lip stain but this one fails as well. The woman leaves and the man gets in trouble with his boss for wasting all the papers and he gives him another stack. The man flees from the office in order to look for the woman and he finds the lip stained paper on top of a mailboxes; he furiously throws it into the air where it then falls into an alley (which appears to be where many of the paper planes have fallen to). Suddenly all the paper planes start to float in mid-air, when the man walks by they begin to follow him in a line and use all their force to push him to a certain direction. Meanwhile the lip stained paper flies on its own and lands in a flower kiosk where the woman is at, she looks at it as if it were familiar and then the paper flies away with the woman chasing after it. The man is pushed into a train by all the paper planes while the woman also chases the lip stained paper plane inside a train. When she finally arrives to the station the plane doesn’t move anymore and then sees the man covered by paper planes which then fly away in order for the couple to get closer. The smile at the fact that they got to see each other once more.

This was such a lovely short film, I can see why it won an Oscar. It portrayed an everyday situation (like when you see a cute guy at the mall and secretly hope you see each other again), but this guy got the opportunity and did what he could in order to get the woman’s attention. Also when the paper planes begin to float and help these strangers see each other again when you thought they no longer had a chance to, you could really see that charming Disney magic that we love and make us hope that anything is possible. The fact that the only colorful thing in the whole short was the woman’s lips and the lip stain on the paper was a nice touch, as if she was the one thing that brought some color into the man’s life. It was the stain that brought them together in the first place after all.

Well I hope you guys enjoyed this brief movie review, and that maybe I motivated you to watch it. Please do, it is super cute and romantic. If you like this Disney you might like this too. See ya soon!

I rate this short 5/5 lip stains