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.
It's an incredible honor to be nominated by the Academy.
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.
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.
I love movies that are funny and scary and truly emotional all in one film, and I don't feel like I see movies like that a lot.
'Coco' is shaping up to be one of the most beautiful films we've made.
I saw a lot of movies that I probably shouldn't have seen. I saw 'Dog Day Afternoon' when I was in first grade - that kind of thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We try our best every time to make engaging films that we're interested in, and we just hope the rest of the world likes them.
Live action movies are someone else's story. With animation, audiences can't think that. Their guards are down.
I never wanted 'Toy Story 3' to feel like another sequel just grafted on. We all know that if you put 3 after your title, it typically means garbage, and we knew that going in.
I didn't want to be the guy who screwed up 'Toy Story.'
I'd really love to watch David Lynch work, to be a fly on the wall.
People loved the first two 'Toy Story' films so much, and the last thing I wanted to do was make a disappointing third film.
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.
It's a strange business, and unfortunately, what we do in animation is a mystery, especially the directors.
The question I get more than any other is, 'What does it mean to direct an animated film?' And the reality is that it's not a whole lot different from what you do in live action.
