I don't care for it. (Spoilers below.)
Sorry for all the ads.
The style of the animation is quite clever: a three-dimensional environment that's rendered in a way so that it looks hand-drawn. Plus, it's black-and-white (except for one character's lipstick), which helps it stand out from the crowd. And the story is told without any dialog, making the short film a completely visual experience.
So why does this award-winning short get no love from me? Two reasons: story and figure design.
The story is simple enough: a young man meets a young woman at a train station on his way to work, they have a "meet cute," and go their separate ways. In his office job, he sees the girl from the train station across the street at the neighboring building. He ignores his duties and tries to get her attention by throwing paper airplanes her way. They all fail to get her attention, but they end up meeting up at the end anyway. The credits roll beside still shots of them talking in a coffee shop.
The basic message is that when you meet the "one," nothing else will matter. Love is your destiny and anything that gets in the way is bad and wrong and out to destroy your happiness. I hate these kinds of stories. Relationships take work; I don't care if two people are "meant" to be together or not, because if they don't work on their relationship, they'll be "destined" to break up.
Also, is this random girl that our protagonist met once going to want to support him when he gets fired from his job? While we don't see the unnamed character actually get fired, we do see him run out of the office despite his angry boss silently reminding him to get back to work. Too many movies and TV shows teach that you need to "follow your heart" to be happy, but these stories ignore that doing so will still have boring parts. I sought out my current job and I've never been happier with a place of employment, but there are still plenty of assignments (or parts of assignments) that I don't really like. Would the story have been that different if he had rushed out to try and find her on his lunch break, only to run out of time and have to head back in once he finds her? He'd give her his number and they'd still be able to meet at the coffee shop, just without risking his job.
And then there were the character designs, or design (singular) in this case. Look, I get that many people equate "thin" with "attractive," but the female character just looks unhealthy. When we first see her at around the 20 second mark, the first thing I thought of was how ridiculously skinny she looked. Not only does she look like a light breeze will knock her over, but they made her waist even smaller. Her waist is so small that her head is actually wider. That's insane! Plus, they've made her eyes so big that they're bigger than her hands (which also look undersized).
Look, I get that animation allows creators to design characters with unnatural or unrealistic proportions, but if they're pushing the limits of femininity, why not make the protagonist look like a Greek statue? Instead, he's also thin, but looks much more natural: his eyes are more proportional, his waist is wider than his head, and he even gets a large nose to give his design personality. The woman's face is pretty but boring. With so many girls developing body-image issues, I disagree with the filmmakers' decision to present such an unrealistic vision of feminine beauty.
While I commend the creative team for mixing old and new styles and limiting themselves to a story told without words, I'm disappointed that they chose such a tired, cliché of a story to tell with characters that are in dire need of a cheeseburger.
Paperman is distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
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