Bilby

Bilby (2018)

Threatened daily by the deadly residents and harsh environment of Australia’s Outback, a lonesome bilby finds himself an unwitting protector, and unexpected friend, to a helpless (and quite adorable) baby bird.

Date of release
2018-06-06
TMDB
8.0 / 10 (212)
Runtime
8m
Genres
Animation, Comedy, Family, Adventure
Director
Pierre Perifel, JP Sans, Liron Topaz

Casting

Interesting facts

Bilby is a 2018 American animated short film written and directed by Liron Topaz, Pierre Perifel and JP Sans in their directorial debuts, and produced by DreamWorks Animation. It centers on a bilby trying to protect an albatross chick from the dangers of the Australian Outback.

Production

By June 2013, Tim Minchin was attached to compose the music and score for Larrikins, which was based on an original concept from screenwriter Harry Cripps. The film followed a timid bilby named Perry who leaves his home under a rock to go on a road trip with a music band in the Outback.

I've recently been working in 3 different continents, missing my kids a lot, sleeping too little and not playing piano enough. And then a couple of days ago, the animated film to which I've dedicated the last 4 years of my life was shut down by the new studio execs. The only way I know how to deal with my impotent fury and sadness is to subject members of the public to the spectacle of me getting drunk and playing ballads.

Minchin spoke more about the film's cancellation on Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast in March 2020, saying how the film was 75% completed with 110 people working on the film, with songs completed. Hans Zimmer was also composing the score.

The film was brought back as a short, as part of the studio's newly announced shorts program. Bilby's three directors had worked together on the Larrikins animation team; Perifel served as head of character animation, Topaz as a lead animator, and Sans as a character supervisor.

Bilby proved to be a testing ground for various new animation software, including MoonRay, a light rendering engine that was used on DreamWorks' feature films beginning with How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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