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We all, to some degree, wish we could have some element of our childhood back again while, for kids, moving on is something they're worried about. They know it's going to happen at some point.
For 'Toy Story 3' to be recognized by the Academy as not only one of the best animated films of the year, but also as one of the 10 best pictures of the year, is both humbling and overwhelming.
It is shocking how much a day-care center is like a prison. They both have security cameras with walled exercise yards. Prisons are permanent day cares for people permanently in time-out - convicts.
I really personalized the pressure to make a good 'Toy Story' film. It made me physically sick at the beginning. Literally, I wanted to throw up in the morning because I was just so racked with stress.
Typically in animation, the characters exist in a kind of stasis. Look at 'The Simpsons' - they never age, the baby never grows up - or 'Peanuts' - the kids never grow up, they always stay the same age.
It wasn't the first film to show a kind of alternate vision of suburbia, but it left an indelible impression, I think, on everybody, and all films like that will forever be measured against 'Blue Velvet.'
When you think about it, the most important thing to a toy is to be played with by a child, and anything that keeps them from being played with gives them stress - things like getting lost, getting broken.
Whether I'm directing live action or animation, my responsibility is the same. I have an audience sitting in a theater with their popcorn, and I've got to show them a good time and make them feel something.
For anyone who's had a transition in their life - heading off to college, parents sending their kids off to college, people getting out of college and heading off into the workforce. Those are major transitions.
If we can tell a good story with characters audiences can care about, I'd like to think that prejudices can fall aside and people can just experience the story and these characters for the human beings that they are.
If you look at the beginning of children's entertainment in literature, the first books that were written for kids were cautionary tales. They were books that were there to teach kids about growing up and how to live life.
We go to movies to be taken away to another place, to be dazzled, to dream, to hopefully be filled with wonder. The design of the world and the look of the film is all in service of trying to create that feeling of wonder in the audience.
With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.
One of the tricky things with animation is, because we spend four years on the movie and everything is done so methodically day by day by day, it can be a struggle to have the finished film feel spontaneous and loose and naturally occurring.
We know that families and kids are going to be an important part of our audience, so we've always made sure that we've picked subject matter that was appropriate for kids. But I think if you try to target a movie to kids, you're going to fail.
I wanted the Andy of Toy Story 3 to be right on the cusp, straddling childhood and adulthood ... I wanted to find this sweet spot where he had gotten tall and had clearly grown up but still retained many boyish qualities, including a boyish charm.
I just ended up focusing on film editing as I was getting my career started. I'm very passionate about editing and will continue to edit for the rest of my career, but it's not like that was all I did and then somehow I grew into directing a movie.
I know I'm going to send my three kids off to college someday. I know my parents will pass away someday. It's one thing to say, 'I'll be able to deal with that day when it comes,' and it's another thing to find yourself at that day, dealing with it.
I looked long and hard at third films in series to see if there were any good ones that I could learn from. And there weren't any that hadn't just gone off the train tracks by their third film. Until, that is, I got to the third 'Lord of the Rings' film.
Everyone looks at our films and thinks that we are somehow able to make movie after movie that does well and is entertaining, but there's an enormous amount of work that goes on under the hood and an enormous number of mistakes that are made along the way.
After we finished 'Toy Story 2,' we talked about going right into making 'Toy Story 3,' because we had an idea that we thought had some promise. But there were a bunch of boring contractual problems going on between Disney and Pixar at the time that kept us from making the movie.
If you're working on something and it's not coming together, it's easy to say, "I don't want to show this, until I've figured it out." But a lot of times you don't really solve the problems, and then you start getting into a bad situation because you don't have the time to fix it.
I grew up loving watching movies, and at a certain point, I started to become fascinated with making movies. Then I went to film school, and I got to dabble with different aspects of moviemaking, and I ended up settling heavily into editing - editing was what I was really adept at, had a passion for.
At Pixar, I don't have to compromise at all. When I look at the finished "Toy Story 3," I don't sit and constantly think, oh, the actor was having a bad day, or oh, it rained and we couldn't use that set. The story that I wanted to tell is what is on screen, and I haven't had to compromise it one iota.
I feel like my job as a storyteller and director is to create an experience where the audience forgets they're in a cinema and can get lost in the story. Things popping out of the screen call attention to the artifice of what you're doing, so I use 3D as more of a window into a world behind the screen.
When I was around 12 or so, I saw 'The Shining.' I just remember that being a turning point for me, where I started to think about the fact that there was a hand behind the film. That it wasn't just this magical story being told - there were actual people crafting these films, and they were works of art.
When we were making 'Toy Story,' my grandmother was very ill, and she knew she was not going to make it. I went back to visit her, and there was a moment during that visit that I had to say goodbye, and I knew I'd never be seeing her again. I looked at her and knew that I was looking at her for the last time.
I had worked for a lot of directors whose work I didn't respect, and as I was editing material, I was thinking about how I would have shot the scenes and what I would have done to make the scenes better. After several years of that, I got to the point that I was pretty confident I could sit in the director's chair.
People talk a lot about Pixar going off the rails. A lot of people are saying they aren't happy that we are making sequels. But for every one of those people, there is one that is happy because they fell in love with the worlds we created. We hope we've proved that a sequel can be every bit as enjoyable as the original.
I'd like to drill in a little more detail into one aspect of cutting which is particularly close to me and that's dialogue editing. It is a vital part of editing especially in animated film, but in the end it is usually completely transparent to the audience. The vocal performances are reported for over several years and the actors are very rarely in recording studios together. That's why the editor has got to all these different performances and edit them together to create the illusion of spontaneity and real action.