A look inside Paperman with Producer Kristina Reed

A look inside Paperman with producer Kristina Reed. From first-time director John Kahrs and producer Kristina Reed come the animated short, Paperman. This one of a kind animated short  will play before Wreck-It-Ralph November 2nd. I loved watching this short, I had heard from a few bloggers who had seen it already that it was going to be a treat. Now I can’t wait to see it again. Paperman is the first hand-drawn, GC animated short ever created at Disney, or any studio for that matter. Paperman is black and white and the musical score and animation tell a beautiful whimsical story of love and determination. I definitely don’t want to ruin Paperman for you by giving too much away. It is after all only fifteen minutes long. The backdrop of this animated short is busy, mid-century New York City on a windy day.

An Inside Look with Kristina Reed

“Thank you. I’m a working mom too and I totally appreciate you made time to come over here to Disney and see what’s going on. I produced a short that is been lucky enough to be the one that’s going to go out in front of Wreck-It-Ralph. Disney hasn’t put a short in front of a movie in a long time. We’re really just thrilled that it’s getting the attention it’s getting.” Kristina said.

Kristina continued by giving us a little background on her and told us “when I first came to the company, I came in 2008 from DreamWorks. I was the head of production and at the time we had Princess and the Frog going on, a hand-drawn film. We were also working on Tangled, the CG film. We were having a lot of conversations among the executives about, you know, were we thinking about this properly. We sort of had this line going down in our crew. We had separated our hand-drawn talent from our CG talent. We were asking ourselves if that was the right way to be thinking of things. It was like being in two different businesses and neither business was as smooth as we wanted it to be.”

“We were having to come up with double the amount of content to feed both pipelines, etcetera. There was this notion of we’re the only studio in the world that has this breadth of talent. Is there something we can do by actually matching them together? Is there some new place we can go visually that no studio has gone before? John Kahrs came forward and pitched this project, Paperman.” Reed continued.

John Kahrs couldn’t make it that day for our press day because he was busy presenting Paperman film at the Ottawa Animation Festival. With dueling schedules Reed and Kahrs get split up a lot.

“This idea came about early on in John’s career. Everyday John would commute through Grand Central Station as a single guy in his late 20’s. There would be throngs of people moving through the train station. John would be thinking to himself, why am I not having a more happy life? I’m a single guy in New York City. I should be on top of the world. Yet, John felt really rather lonely. Every once in a while he’d make a connection with somebody, eye contact in the station and think is that the girl of my dreams? Then she’d be gone. This short came from John’s experience as a lonely commuter in the big city” said Kristina on behalf of John.

[Tweet “I hope one day the Disney Animated Short Paperman will be made into a full-length feature.”]

Check out Paperman when Wreck-It Ralph smashes into theaters November 2, 2012. Don’t be late to the theater.

Disney provided me with a trip to LA in return for my honest review on the movies and events mentioned above. All expenses were paid by Disney and no other compensation was given. All experiences and opinions are 100% my own.