The Blue Umbrella (2013)

There is a moment early in The Blue Umbrella when a city street acquires a face, and then several more, and we understand that Pixar's technical department has been let out for recess. Saschka Unseld's six-minute short, released in 2013 in front of Monsters University, follows a blue umbrella and a red umbrella through a rainstorm that behaves like a matchmaker. Drain pipes gurgle. Awnings whistle. Mailboxes and construction signs and gutters conspire, with the quiet efficiency of a heist crew, to reunite two objects whose owners have walked in different directions. It is wordless, scored by Jon Brion, and rendered with global illumination so persuasive that the wet pavement looks damp enough to ruin a pair of shoes.

The film has no interest in argument. It has no dialogue to lecture with and no thesis to advance. The romance is between two umbrellas, which spares us any gendered politics, and the cast is composed of street furniture, which spares us a casting conversation. Rain here is not a symptom of anything. It is weather, and it is beautiful, and the director has called the short a love declaration to the rain, a position that climate-minded viewers may find retrograde but which the film states without apology. Two umbrellas fall in love in the rain. That is the entire proposition.

What remains is craft. Pareidolia is deployed deliberately, faces coaxed out of concrete and glass, and the result is a small, generous piece of filmmaking that asks nothing of its audience except six minutes and a willingness to feel something about a bent umbrella in traffic. Our classification apparatus finds nothing to detain it. No grievance, no sermon, no agenda. Only rain, and two umbrellas, and a city that briefly cares.