Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sometimes suffering is a weird attraction.
I'm not actually sure if guilt is an emotion.
I guess different brains work in different ways.
Yeah, to bring families together I need to go away.
When I was in middle school, I liked to make cartoons.
In the end, passion and hard work beats out natural talent.
There's no way for me to anticipate what people will like or not like.
Work hard! In the end, passion and hard work beats out natural talent.
I don't think it's physically possible for little kids to know what abstract thought is.
When we did 'Toy Story,' that was an all-hands-on-deck situation that really was time-intensive.
Traditionally, animation has been dominated by men in the past. I don't know why it attracted guys.
I kind of feel like... I have a slower instinct than most live-action directors, but I have more patience.
Any great movie you watch has some element of darkness or loss or some suffering in it. That's what makes the fun parts fun.
I love to go to the airports and just put on, like, dark glasses, so nobody can tell I'm staring at them, and just draw people.
My father was working on his Ph.D. on Danish choral music - the Danish choral music of Carl Nielsen - so over there to do research.
'Toy Story' really felt like just a bunch of guys working in their garage for fun. When it came out and people liked it, it was mind-blowing.
Walt Disney wasn't making films for kids. Neither were the Muppets. A lot of the great, really cool films, they weren't making them for kids.
Little kids definitely have desires and jealousy. There are some emotions that don't show up at birth, but by three or four, they are all there.
Parents don't want their children to lose that purity and innocence of childhood. We want to bottle that and hold onto that, but it's impossible.
And as I was sort of doodling, I was thinking, surprise and fear - probably fairly similar so let's just lose surprise. And that left us with five.
One of the other experts we consulted with, this guy named Dacher Keltner, he was big on sadness as community bonding - I think is the word he used.
Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and, at that same point, it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations.
It's really, always, the story and the characters that come first, and the other things are kind of dealt with in time or, in fact, driven by the story.
A lot of the issues I faced in junior high was what got me into animation. It was easier to sit on the side and draw cartoons than to engage with people.
Each one of the films get built up and strengthened and reinforced, and we're not afraid to rip stuff out and redo it until we feel it's worthy of the 'Pixar' name.
And in part that's good but then, like any emotion - and this is something we learned from the research as well - there are positive and negative aspects to all of these.
I don't think of 'Monsters, Inc.' as existing in the same space as Carl Frederickson from 'Up,' or whatever, you know? They seem like completely different universes to me.
Back in the days before the Internet, there was no place to put a short film, so Mike Gribble and Spike Decker had this festival of animation. My student films got selected.
With sadness specifically, in America you read about people medicating to avoid sadness. They don't want to experience sadness, and yet it's such a vital part of being human.
I loved 'Dumbo.' I watched Bugs Bunny time and again. The Muppets were big, too. All of those, they have this real, not darkness but poignancy, that's what makes it stick with you.
There's something really emotional about not having any sound. That allows, I think, the audience to participate more actively and kind of imagine what are they talking about there?
I made tons of films. I did animation for my friends' films. I animated scenes just for the fun of it. Most of my stuff was bad, but I had fun, and I tried everything I knew to get better.
Toy Story we found, sorta by accident, because we didnt know what we were doing, the idea of being replaced by somebody. Everybody has that fear, or encounters this jealousy at some point.
As a director, nobody told me I'd be talking to people all day. I'm naturally reclusive - I feel myself peek out at a certain point and go, 'All the extrovert in me is done! I'm on reserve!'
They're expecting us to make mistakes, and they've set up a process that allows us to correct for that and do it again and iterate. So I think that's a real key to the films that we've made.
It's weird - on almost every film I've worked on, the first sequence we storyboard ends up being the first sequence that goes into animation, and ends up being almost shot-for-shot the same.
'Toy Story' we found, sorta by accident, because we didn't know what we were doing, the idea of being replaced by somebody. Everybody has that fear, or encounters this jealousy at some point.
We all want happiness in our life. I mean, there are so many books on, like, how to be happy and what you need for happiness, and you want that for your kid, too; you want your kid to be happy.
There's that bubble of childhood that makes you innocently do anything. Then, when you get older, that pops, and you're aware of limitations and judgment and social pressures and things like that.
So this idea of moving seemed like a good way to sort of represent that metaphorically. It also is something for me personally. When I was in fifth grade - so about 11 - my folks moved us to Denmark.
We've tried to regulate things so that you at least get to go home at night and not have to pull all-nighters and see them on weekends and things. So, you know, like everything in life, it's a balance.
Well, we try to - we definitely try to have a balance. And I think things have gotten a lot better at Pixar. When we did "Toy Story," that was an all hands on deck situation that really was time intensive.
But the truth is, at some point, our films - almost every single one of them - are really bad. And it's largely hats off to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull who have set up a system whereby they're expecting it.
If you were feeling sad right now and you recall a sad - or, a very happy memory from the past, it will be tinged with more sadness based on your current feeling. So we felt like that was actually on solid scientific ground .
'Monsters,' everybody has the thought of monsters in your closet as a kid, and more importantly, the idea of becoming a parent. We're always kind of looking for those emotional nuggets. They're always at the heart of the story.
We found some scientists think that there are basically three emotions. Others went up to 27. Others had 16. Some were in the middle. So we were kind of left with no definitive answer to our basic question - how many are there?
There was a guy that I got to know pretty well - Joe Grant. He was one of the creators of Dumbo and worked side-by-side with Disney. Being a total Disney nerd, I was obsessed with asking him questions. He was 92 when I got to know him.
It might have been introduced slowly over the course of the years as you recall this memory over and over. So that was a very cool but complex idea that we thought about representing in the film but could not find a way to make it work.
I wanted to make sure that 'Up' wasn't a 3D movie about a man who sails his house to South America. It's a movie about an old man who sails his house to South America that also happens to be in 3D. So the first thing is always the story.
At Pixar, of course, we have all these people, and they're just used to our process now where it's a discussion; it's a discovery. It's not individual artists going and fussing off by themselves in isolation and then handing their work in.