Paper Birds review: a narrative-driven diorama crafted with love

The narrative spine of Paper Birds is formed by the testimony of a young boy who recounts a speculator tale: of parallel alternate worlds, beautiful and haunting; of his missing sister, who has slipped through the cracks of reality; of fantastic creatures—including the titular variety—visiting from another plain of existence. It’s a format with a comforting sense of antiquity: one can imagine similar stories spun around campfires since time immemorial. 

The aesthetic of this story-driven, 30 minute experience is a wonderful example of VR integrating very old elements—in this instance diorama or dollhouse-like sets—into a space where their beauty can be freshly exploited. An early scene takes place in the boy’s village, during the early hours of the morning, before dawn’s light, depicting him leaving his house and navigating through the town, illuminated in the soft glow of windows and streetlamps. As he walks rightwards through the space, darkened clumps of the tableau are lit up and activated—a highly effective and conceptually simple form of visual reveal, memorably deployed in the VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Wolves in the Walls. 

After walking across a wooden bridge (which reminded me of the central location in Allumette) the boy sits down and plays the accordion, triggering the first of several interactive flourishes. These pretty elements are inessential to the story, which continues irrespective of our input. The first is particularly extraneous (our hands create trails of magical blue light) but the next, about 10 minutes in, enables vision of a dark parallel reality—”the other side”, where the boy’s younger sister has been taken to by her “shadow”.

Evidence of this alternate world come in the titular form: incandescent electric blue birds. The childrens’ grandfather freaks out when he sees them, prompting a plot thread focusing on his past as a great musician and composer—the birds symbolizing dark forces that drain one’s creative energy and vitality. There’s a lovely moment in a cozy jazz club, where the virtual camera moves backwards from musicians playing at the far end of the room to the childrens’ grandparents, seated at a small table. I love that backwards momentum: how the space behind you, and in front of the musos, is slowly and fluidly revealed. 

This heavily sculpted moment is clearly indebted to the cinema, but it’s not like moments in 360 videos that lazily import filmmaking techniques and expect them to work in VR. The unveiling of spatial depth in this moment is quite magical: I’ve experienced Paper Giants several times and enjoy leaning forward and curving my head as the camerawork makes its way back.

There’s also a beautiful immersion featuring a mountain cable car and a fun, astral-projecting finale visualizing the creation of music in an outer space setting, featuring streaks of light that activate musical elements. In these moments the developers are clearly saying: “we made more than a standard diorama; our production has been crafted with love.”