I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there's something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it's fleeting, and it's temporal.
Work hard! In the end, passion and hard work beats out natural talent.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
When we did 'Toy Story,' that was an all-hands-on-deck situation that really was time-intensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I always feel like if you have a smaller crew, you can not only get to know the individual strengths of people more specifically, but then, you also give them a longer runway to be able to apply the knowledge that they have learned to subsequent work.
There's no way for me to anticipate what people will like or not like.
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!'
