Bippy the Little Robot, Glenna Burmer’s new animated short video, has been wowing film festival judges in the U.S. and Europe since its release this fall.
The ten-minute short recently took home the Director’s Choice Award at the prestigious Berlin Sci-Fi Film Festival where it was part of a festival segment called “AI, Extinction, and You,” joining films from the U.S., Sweden and the Netherlands.
The story of Bippy takes place in the future after humans are annihilated; all that remains are broken and forgotten machines. But the bleak landscape does not deter Bippy, a perky little trashcan. With an irrepressible zest for life, Bippy and his android-cat sidekick embark on a hopeful journey to find other machines.
In an abandoned music studio, the little robot discovers a broken-down piano where he improvises a jazz piece that awakens a pink toaster named Anna. In a swirling dance sequence using innovative motion capture, Anna and Bippy perform a dreamy pas de deux that personifies the beauty and resilience of the human spirit. As music fills the air, the future grows a little brighter.
The film’s message of hope is resonating with international audiences. Besides winning the Director’s Choice Award in Berlin, Bippy gathered awards for best animation, best picture, best montage and best visual effects from three film festivals in California (Best Shorts Competition, IndieFEST, and Global Shorts), Italy (Florence Film Awards and Milan Gold Awards), France (Paris Film Awards), Turkey (Antakya International Film Festival), and Albania (Lumina Flicks International Short Film Fest).
Bippy the Little Robot is the second animated film produced by Glenna Burmer in collaboration with Deep Sky & Imaginary Planet. Unlike most films where the music is composed after filming ends, Burmer’s music drives the story. In her creative process, she envisions the storyline, composes the music to relay that narrative, and creates its distinctive characters, then brings in an animation studio to visually translate the music’s style and atmosphere.
Deep Sky’s design/post-production work and Imaginary Planet’s 2D and 3D animation perfectly capture the story’s bleak post-apocalyptic world and the central character, Bippy. The innovative motion graphics used in the dance sequence between Anna and Bippy, along with additional 2D and 3D animation, resulted in a digital montage that is unique in its scope and originality.
More about the production team
A classical composer and award-winning concert and animated-film producer in Seattle, Burmer’s music and original voice create compelling stories that resonate with audiences worldwide. Her first animated film Nana korobi, Ya oki received the 2021 Seattle Filmmaker Award and was selected to tour Great Britain in 2022. It just won a Best Animation award at the Alpine International Festival in Bern, Switzerland, where it was shown at the request of festival producers.
Deep Sky, based in Portland, Oregon, is a design, post-production and live-action studio known for its groundbreaking work in 2D and 3D animation, motion graphics, product visualization and visual effects. Collaborating with fellow Portland-based studio Imaginary Planet, which specializes in character-centric 2D and 3D animation and development, they bring remarkable versatility in style and genre to their projects.