Paperman Themes

Whether a director is creating a full length feature film or a five minute short film, they face many decisions about the best way to communicate a character’s thoughts and feelings and convey their themes and messages in the film. There are many techniques used to convey these themes and noticeable examples in the short films Paperman by Disney and Partly Cloudy by Pixar are music and colour, which can both be used very differently but very effectively to convey the themes of friendship and romance.
The musical scores in the two short films are quite different and reflect different things but both work to communicate their themes well. The music in Partly Cloudy doesn’t generally effect the mood of the scene, it is in fact, the other way around.

In Partly Cloudy everything is coloured so the director uses shades of black, grey and white to contrast with the rest of the clouds and birds. Everything around the characters is the same as everywhere else which was done to show how much they stand out. The storm cloud is obviously different from the rest of the clouds, who are all happy shades of pink and yellow and other sunset shades, whereas he is dark grey or black depending on his mood. At first the bird doesn’t seem that different to the rest, colour wise, but his white is darker than the other birds and has a generally darker, colouring, showing his connection and friendship to the storm cloud. In Paperman colour is used sparingly. Everything in the film is black and white except for the girl’s lipstick which is a bold and bright red. This serves to show the romantic connection between the two characters and also how she is a break from the black and white world and people all around them. The red of the lipstick is also used to mark a paper, which is also his only connection to her. Red is commonly associated with passion and love which is exactly what the director used this red for, ending the film with the paper plane with her lip mark leading the couple together. Colour was used to make a point in both films, however the statement was given more impact in Paperman with the general use of black and white and the bold statement of the red. The colouring used in Partly Cloudy was more relaxed, using it to solidify a point rather than make