Bao is a 2018 American computer-animated short film written and directed by Domee Shi and produced by Pixar Animation Studios. It is the first Pixar short film to be directed by a female director. It was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival before being released with Incredibles 2 on June 15, 2018. The film is about an aging and lonely Chinese Canadian mother suffering from empty nest syndrome, who receives an unexpected second chance at motherhood when she makes a steamed bun (baozi) that comes to life. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 91st Academy Awards.
Plot
In Toronto, Canada, a Chinese-Canadian woman cooks a meal of baozi for her and her husband. One of her buns comes alive, much to her shock. She raises the steamed bun as a child, feeding and caring for it, as it enjoys the time spent with her. Eventually, the bun wishes to play with other children, but his overprotective mother refuses to allow it, much to his ire. As the bun grows, he desires increasing amounts of independence, which creates tension between the two of them that gradually alienates them from each other. When the bun introduces the mother to his new fiancée, with whom he will leave home, the mother protests. She tries to stop the steamed bun from leaving, and in a fit of desperation, she eats the bun, after which she cries over what she has done.
Later, as the mother lies in bed, her real son enters the room, revealing that the whole sequence was an allegorical dream. His father urges him to talk to his mother, but she rebuffs him. As he and his mother sit on the edge of her bed, he offers her the same treat he once refused on the bus, which they share in an emotional moment. Later, after reconciling, the son and his fiancée join his mother in making buns, as his father looks on with approval.
Production
Bao was directed by Domee Shi and produced by Becky Neiman-Cobb. Bao was the first of 35 Pixar shorts to be directed by a woman, made more significant as well as the fact that the animation industry is male-dominated as a whole. Shi first began working on Bao as a storywriter on the film Inside Out, and says she wanted to work creatively on a project on her own. The earliest sketches of Bao date back to January 2014, when Shi began work on it as a side project, drawing inspiration from classic fairy tales and her experience as an only child. It began as a brainstorm of different steamed bun ideas and characters with Shi recalling, "This image popped into my head of this mom nuzzling her little baby steamed bun to death, and I had to draw it down." Having been an only child while growing up in Toronto, she identified herself with the metaphor of the "overprotected little steamed bun." Shi worked on Bao alone for two years before bringing in a crew.
When asked why the film has no dialogue, Shi explained that she wanted it to be understood universally by audiences, without any language barrier. She also said that she wanted to challenge herself to tell the story visually, given the visual nature of animation as a medium, and rely solely on elements such as acting, set design, color and lighting to evoke emotions. The only recorded dialogue in the short film is a scene in which the Father is watching television. The Mandarin dialogue in the details of that scene is an homage to old Cantonese soap operas that Shi watched with her mother growing up.
The Mother character eating the steamed bun was one of the first choices made when creating the film. She wants to keep the steamed bun character to herself so bad that she eats it, though she regrets it immediately. This was itself based on something Shi's mother would say: "Oh I wish I could put you back in my stomach so I knew exactly where you were at all times." Shi herself had frustrations while growing up about being coddled so she talked to her mom as well as other parents to see the other perspective. Shi very much uses the short to step outside of her own point of view in order to identify with the mother who is the main character. It was told with the theme of primal love, as Shi explains, "the type of love you would destroy so it would not disappear and go away."