Piper Short

In the grand tradition of Pixar films, a new short will debut with this summer's Finding Dory. The six-minute film, called Piper, tells the story of a hungry baby sandpiper who suffers from hydrophobia, fear of water. Director Alan Barillaro had noticed that the birds eat between waves, but run from the oncoming water.

"Seeing the way these sandpipers react to waves and run, I always felt, 'Gosh, that’s a film,  that’s a character,'" said Barillaro. "It's always fun to show a world we’re familiar with but from a different perspective. We’ve all been to the beach, but have we ever viewed water from just an inch off the sand? That could be very fearful from a bird’s perspective."

The story, which grew from a simple animation test into a full fledged short, tells of a child learning about the food chain from her parents, as well as another child, a hermit crab. "It's the kid at the playground feeling," says Barillaro. "You fall down and you feel so small, but you look and see someone even smaller than you brush themselves off and tackle something, and learn from that in your own way. It was important to me to stay in the kid world and see the world from Piper’s eyes, and not be from the human perspective."

Finding Dory and Piper arrive in theaters on June 17.