AnimationWorld Magazine — December 10, 2018
DreamWorks Animation Short ‘Bilby’ A Testing Ground for New Production Tools
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Or, in this case, Bilby. The second project to emerge from DreamWorks Animation’s fledgling Shorts Program, Bilby was resurrected from the ashes of Larrikins, using characters created for the since-cancelled animated feature that was to be directed by Tim Minchin and Chris Miller inside an all-new story about never giving up.
Making its world premiere in June at the close of the Annecy Festival, Bilby was also selected to screen at the Edmonton Film Festival, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, and the BFI London Film Festival, among others, winning the Audience Award at the Palm Springs Shorts Fest and Jury’s Choice Award at the SIGGRAPH 2018 Computer Animation Festival.
Set in the Australian outback, Bilby follows the desert-dwelling marsupial Perry through the trials and tribulations of “parenthood” after he saves an adorable defenseless chick from predators and inadvertently becomes her protector. The nearly eight-minute CG-animated short film was directed by animator, storyboard artist and character designer Pierre Perifel, supervising animator JP Sans, and character lead animator Liron Topaz, and produced by Kelly Cooney over a roughly 10-month span.
The dialogue-free short also served as a testing ground for new software that is now in use on all the studio’s animated features currently in production, including The Hidden World, third and final chapter in the tremendously popular How To Train Your Dragon franchise. These new tools include the new light rendering engine Moonray, debris scattering tool Sprinkles, an upgraded wind system for grass and fur developed by Jason Weber, and Locomotion, an animation tool developed by a team led by Topaz for creating cycles of motion.