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One reason for keeping Disney animation separate from Pixar was that by solving their own problems when they finished a film, Disney could say, 'Nobody bailed us out; we did it.' And it's a very important social thing for them to do that.
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.
I'll watch a Pixar movie over and over and over again. I'll be with friends of mine who have kids, that want to watch 'Finding Nemo,' and I'm like, 'Yeah, okay, let's watch 'Nemo' again, for the seven billionth time!,' because they're amazing movies.
I grew up watching Pixar movies. And my favourite - if you don't count 'The Good Dinosaur' - is the first Pixar movie my older brother showed me. That would be 'Monsters, Inc.' I also like Disney - 'The Lion King' is probably my all-time favourite movie.
There's a lot of imagination in Asia, and I believe that the next Google will come from there, and the next Pixar. I believe that the great new media companies will come out of Asia and surpass the big media conglomerates that exist right now in the West.
Working at Pixar you learn the really honest, hard way of making a great movie, which is to surround yourself with people who are much smarter than you, much more talented than you, and incite constructive criticism; you'll get a much better movie out of it.
I like doing everything. That's why I came to Pixar, as opposed to Disney or any other studio - it's small. At the time I started, I was, like, the 10th person in the animation group, and we all had to do everything. That's the way I like it, keeping it fresh.
I love Pixar films; I think they're the greatest filmmakers in the world. I love Disney films. 'Tangled,' was great. I loved 'How to Train Your Dragon,' the Dreamworks film. But it's not for me. I don't want to make a film for families; I want to make adult films.
I don't think that photorealism is required to offer emotions. You can have very abstract characters and renderings offering the same type of emotions - look at Pixar movies: they're not photorealistic; they're stylised, and it doesn't prevent emotion from happening.
One of the head guys at Disney categorically said to me, 'We don't want to make children's films any more. We want to make films that are going to appeal to all quadrants.' Hence you have films like 'Shrek' and all the Pixar stuff, which is designed to suit everybody.
I auditioned for 'Coco' when I was nine years old, and I had no idea I was auditioning for a Disney/Pixar movie. When I was 10, they told me that it was going to be a Disney/Pixar movie, and I was just mind-blown. I was so shocked and thankful that I was going to Pixar.
We can still do a stop motion feature for about one-third of what it costs Pixar or DreamWorks or Blue Sky to make a feature. But nobody is interested in a film that cost $50 to 60 million with the potential to do $120 million. They want to risk big money to make huge money.
In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn't work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They're relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists.
If you look at Disney's slate compared to the other Hollywood studios, it stands out because of big titles and strong franchise films which also extend beyond cinemas, to merchandising or theme parks given the legacy of the four brands - Disney, Pixar, Marvel and now Lucasfilm.
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.
Besides kind of like the Wes Anderson, or, of course, a lot of the European movies, most everybody in the States, the big studios, make pretty much the same film. And we're kind of held to Pixar standards, or Disney standards, as it's kind of always been in the animation industry.
I'm not as successful as Pixar or Dreamworks, and that is disappointing to me, because I think my films are as valid as a Pixar film. I think there's an audience for my films. I know there's a market for someone like Quentin Tarantino, who basically does adult cartoons in live action.
Even in the Pixar and DreamWorks animated movies, there are themes that could be taken into an adult area very easily. 'Zootopia,' I think, is the closest so far; I love that movie because they really did push the envelope as far as the ideas and writing of an animated film for families.
Out of the blue, I received this offer and invitation to be a part of this movie, 'The Good Dinosaur.' I turned to my Pixar experts, my kids, and asked them what this could all be about. Of course, they flipped out, and it was pretty obvious from their reaction that I was going to do this.
There's the animation ghetto of feature films in this country. There's this flavor at DreamWorks, and Pixar does their own thing, and generally they're safe. But if you look at Walt Disney's original films, at the time and in the context, they weren't safe. They were really dark and troubling.
Part of being the successful Pixar is that we will take risks on teams and ideas, and some of them won't work out. We only lose from this if we don't respond to the failures. If we respond, and we think it through and figure out how to move ahead, then we're learning from it. That's what Pixar is.
At Pixar, we believe strongly that filmmakers should develop ideas they are passionate about. This may sound like a no-brainer, but in fact in Hollywood, the big movie studios have whole departments devoted to acquiring and developing projects that will only later be paired with a director-for-hire.
From an animation perspective, it doesn't get better than Pixar. You're working so much in the blind because the huge circle of collaborators that's required to pull off a film like this means that you are just one small arc in that large circle. The level of trust that you have to give into is significant.
To tell you the truth, I hadn't seen any Pixar until I went to see 'Wall-E,' and I watched it and I was shocked to see how adult it was, with the setting in our lives, both present and future, and how they dealt with it... And then quite relieved to find that the one I was working on, 'Up,' how adult it was.
I have tremendous brand experience. What I do a lot for Disney is manage the great brands of this company, whether it's Disney, ESPN, ABC, Pixar, Marvel, 'Star Wars.' And I'm very engaged in technology and its impact on the consumer, either what experience you deliver for them or how to market and sell to them.
After Pixar's 2006 merger with the Walt Disney Company, its CEO, Bob Iger, asked me, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and other Pixar senior managers to help him revive Disney Animation Studios. The success of our efforts prompted me to share my thinking on how to build a sustainable creative organization.
I think, in Japan, animation isn't relegated to being a genre unto itself. It's just a medium by which you can tell any number of stories, be it horror or action or adventure or drama or whatever, and we're trying to do that as well. Every film that you go see from Pixar, we're hoping is a little bit of a surprise.
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.
The way we work at Pixar is we write the script, but then we quickly move on into story reel, which is basically like a comic-book version of the film. And then we do our own dialogue and music and sound effects, all in an effort to be able to basically sit in the theater and watch the movie before we shoot it, essentially.
But I believe that as the quality of these platforms gets better, and as products like Roblox start to look and feel more like a Pixar movie, you're going to see the span of these platforms get bigger, and ultimately I believe there will be a platform company that's as big if not bigger than the publicly traded game publishers.
There's always room out there for the hand-drawn image. I personally like the imperfection of hand drawing as opposed to the slick look of computer animation. But you can do good stuff either way. The Pixar movies are amazing in what they do, but there's plenty of independent animators who are doing really amazing things as well.
