Cigar Exclusive! Pixar director moves on 'Up' in world

04/29/09 - Pixar has long cornered the market on spectacular CGI stunners. For more than two decades, the studio masterminds have been churning out colossal hits, combining their large-scale animation with an odd knack for drawing emotion from the weirdest of characters. And the formula works: given the proper story line, Pixar could take a poorly-maintained gas station toilet and make it a likable hero.

The studio-heads take an inspired idea and inflate it to sweeping, monumental proportions. Take last summer's smash, "Wall-E," for example. If you don't think a creaky, environmentally-conscious robot can make you weep, well then, you clearly haven't gazed into Wall-E's sad, mechanical eyes.

It makes only makes sense, then, that Pixar's latest creation, "Up," which lands in theaters May 29, is another meticulously animated trip that spins a simple story into a full-blown (and, in this case, literal) flight of fancy.

"Up" follows a curmudgeonly balloon salesman, Carl Fredricksen, as he sets our to fulfill his childhood dream of exploring Paradise Falls, a pristine oasis in the wilds of South America. Rendered as an eerie terrain dripping with color and brimming with bizarre creatures, Paradise Falls is all Carl has left after his wife Ellie dies.

And with nothing to lose- aside from a ramshackle house that's more or less doomed for the bulldozer treatment - Carl embarks on the grandiose adventure he's always dreamed of: he hitches a thousand balloons to his house, inflates them all at once, and sets sail.

The film's director, Pixar director, animator, and general mastermind, Pete Docter ("Toy Story 2," "Monsters Inc.") sat down to talk to the Cigar about his latest feat of animated artistry.

"It was basically born out of the idea of escaping society," Docter said of the film's creative spark. "We drew this house with balloons in it, and just felt like, 'yeah that's appealing.' So we were just asking ourselves, 'who's in there, and what is he doing, and where did he come from?'"

"We were thinking that something about a cranky old man has a lot of humor potential," Docter detailed, "and as we were working on it we realized that it had a lot emotion to it as well,"

And the likeability of a the main character is crucial because Pixar's process is overwhelmingly character-driven: "The way we work at Pixar," Docter explained, "is we have our team that's making the film and then we get together about every four months and show it to the other directors so they all come in and watch the movie, in whatever state it's in, and usually the first comments we get are about the characters or the main character."

"Carl was fun," Docter added, "because he could be a jerk and likable at the same time. He could slam the door in the kid's face and you're like, 'eh, well, he's earned that.'"

But in Pixar's cuddly, freakish menagerie of well-known characters, Carl is notably one of the first human ones; Docter, however, was quick to note that any character, if it's well-crafted, can be relatable. "Even though this might be a bug or a monster or a fish, there has to be something about what they're going through that I can relate to on some level," he said.

"There's this weird thing where the more specific you get, the more generally it applies. If you're foggy about a character's situation then you're always looking at it at arm's length. There's something about Carl's situation that I think appeals to people in some way and that's what we're looking for in any character."

On the visual end of things, the film, with its focus on adventure and expedition, has a superb sense of landscape and geography- and the studio went to great lengths to get the feel right, "This one we actually got to go to South America and, right where Venezuela meets Brazil and Guyana, there's this place called Triple Point, and right on that point is this amazing, weird tabletop mountain," Docter relayed.

"It's full of these weird rock shapes and it's very wind swept...It's as close as I'll ever get to going to Mars. It just felt really alien. I kind of think people are going to watch the movie and go, 'Boy you guys have an active imagination. But this is all real, it's actually there."

"We took small rickety planes to get down there," Docter recounted, " and then a helicopter and a Jeep. We hiked up the side of it and we camped up on top and took a lot of pictures, and sketches, and drawings, and paintings and things, and really just kind of felt what it was like up there."

Docter admitted, though, that the project's evolution was anything but smooth. "The truth is that every one of our films has been an absolute disaster at some point. It's just that we allow ourselves the time to fix it. And we have a whole system set up of other directors coming in for support. We do off-sites, where everybody just shutters up their own productions and everybody meets for two days, and focuses entirely on one film."

"We allow ourselves to make mistakes," Docter divulged, " and we expect it. At the beginning we just focus on the story and don't even think about, 'well, jeez, how are we even going to do 10,000 balloons?'"

And although orchestrating the projects can be messy, the Pixar team goes at each film full-force, "We often have to chase people out, like, 'go home. Have a life,'" Docter laughed. "Because they'll often try to stay there make everything they touch as best as they can... which is a good problem to have."

"But they've done a great job of just setting up the studio as a good, collaborative place. We're spoiled rotten; it's a fun place."

The intense, mistake-riddled process seems to be working just fine though, because, in the realm of the fantastic, Pixar still reigns supreme: "We try to, on every film, create all these different layers to things," Docter explained, "so that there's enough for adults to really sink their teeth into and to feel like, 'oh this isn't just fluffy.'"