UP!

Can you give some advice to young people who would like to work in animation?

Pete Docter: I get a lot of people telling me, “I’m thinking of making an animated film.” Well don’t think about it… DO IT! Today’s technology makes it easier than ever to create films right in your home. I had a teacher tell me, “You’ve got 10 thousand bad drawings in you before you get to the good ones. So get drawing.” The same goes for films (though as you’re making them they’re all works of genius).

Bob Peterson: Several things. First of all, just start animating! Don’t wait for someone to say it’s ok. When I was younger I drew a comic strip that appeared everyday in my college newspaper – I got to draw a lot and get a ton of feedback from readers. This was invaluable to me as a storyteller today. Always carry a notebook to do sketches. Watch and analyze animation. Go to conferences and get to know people – it is who you know sometimes that does get you the job. The best advice is to make sure to get good life experiences – we draw from our experiences every day in story and animation!

What was your experience like taking the film to Cannes?

Pete Docter: Cannes was amazing. It was overwhelming, like something out of a fever dream. Here we are, a bunch of geeks who draw cartoons, being mobbed by reporters and fans, at one of the most prestigious international film festivals in the world… I kept thinking, “You’ve got the wrong guys!” But we think of what we do as filmmaking — not anything more or less. We don’t think we should get any special “free pass,” or be seated at the little kids’ table, just because we use animation to tell our stories. And being selected to open the Cannes Film Festival showed us that the film community feels the same way. It was very gratifying.

Bob Peterson: It was like Alice going through the looking glass! Or another metaphor, it was like Pixar is a space administration and they sent us as astronauts to another planet. We kept pinching ourselves that it was real. Cannes after all welcomes amazing live action films with unique content. To be the first animated film to open the festival was an honor! The standing ovation after the film ended will be a memory I will always cherish.

What do you think is the most important adventure in life?

Bob Peterson: The great thing about this film and any film we work on is that it contains truths taken from our lives. Pixar lets the directors create an “autobiography.” In other words, things that are important to us make it into the film. I do believe that the greatest adventures happen between me and my kids, my wife, and in small moments. A morning around the kitchen table eating breakfast is an adventure in my house.

Is there anything about the movie that you’re still not satisfied with? If you could go back and change one thing about the movie after the fact, what would it be?

Pete Docter: We’ve trained ourselves to look for ways to improve our films at every turn. As John Lasseter says, we never actually finish our films, we just release them. So yes, every time I watch “Up,” I see things I would change… cut out two frames here for better timing, add another gag there… but overall I am happy with it. I’d better be after five years of work!

I’ve read a lot about the character of Carl being inspired by actor Spencer Tracy, but not so much about the source of Charles Muntz. Could you confirm if, in some way, he was inspired by actors like Errol Flynn or Clark Gable, funny adventurers?

Pete Docter: For Carl, we looked at Spencer Tracy, Walter Matthau, James Whitmore… as well as our own grandparents. For Muntz, we modeled him on strong, 30′s era adventurous types — Errol Flynn and Walt Disney were two inspirations, as well as real life adventurers like Roald Amundsen and Percy Fawcett.

Of all the exotic locales in the world, why did you choose South America as the place of Carl and Russell’s big adventure?

Bob Peterson: We wanted our locale to reflect and resonate with Carl’s emotional state in the film. The tepuis, or table top mountains, of South America are old, isolated, rugged, and dangerous but with a soulful beauty – a pretty good description of Carl. Going there gave us a good sense of what it would be like for Carl and his friends to be up there. In the film, we used a great many plants and rock shapes that we saw from the tepui.

One of the most amazing things in “Up,” I think, is the treatment of the love story between Carl and Ellie, this is a true love beyond death. Could you explain us the development of this crucial storyline?

Bob Peterson: Great question. The love story was the spine of the movie. When we develop these films we look for themes that guide us in how we tell the story. As the process of writing progressed, we realized that our main theme was “How does a person define adventure?” Is adventure out there in great deeds, or can it also be between people in the small moments that make up a life. Carl and Ellie’s love story helped us tell that theme – that small moments lead to a life’s adventure.

Do you remember the first time you drew something and thought, “Wow, this is something I want to do for a living.” Do you remember what you drew?

Pete Docter: You know how there are always those kids in your elementary school class that are really good at drawing? They sit there and “wow” everyone by drawing horses and tanks and battles and stuff? That was NOT me. I was lousy at drawing. But as soon as I figured out I could make something look like it was moving — and thinking — I was hooked. My parents are musicians, as are my sisters, so I was dragged to a lot of concerts growing up. I would always steal everyone’s programs and draw all over them, thinking up jokes like, “What would happen if all the strings on his violin broke?” or “What if someone fell in the tuba?” Comic gold, I’m telling you!

Bob Peterson: I remember my teacher in 4th grade commenting on the hands that I drew on a surfer surfing a wave. That was the first time I was conscious of my drawings. But more than my own drawings, I was truly inspired by the cartoons of Charles Schulz as a kid, and I wanted to emulate him – my cartoon strips in college strived to have the Schulzian mix of surrealism and Charlie Brown angst. A bit of that combo shows up in “Up.”

How was the idea for collars enabling dogs to talk arrived at? How much of it was comedy and how much of it was inspired by fact?

Bob Peterson: We knew we wanted to give Carl a new family including a new “grandson” and “family dog.” It was a gauntlet laid down in front of him to accept new people into his life. Before Russell was invented, we just had Dug along for the journey and it turned out to a pretty quiet journey. So we invented the collars. We love comedy and we knew that the collars would provide plenty of laughs, peering into our beloved canine friends’ brains. But more importantly, Dug is a mentor for Carl in that new relationships are always offered to us, and it is up to us to act on them.

I love the amount of research that’s been put into the look of the mountain tops; were any similar tests conducted into using helium balloons to lift an entire house?

Pete Docter: The first thing our technical team did when they started working on the balloons was to figure out how many balloons it would take to lift a house in real life. Here’s his math: Carl’s house is 1,600 sq ft. He found some figures saying that the average 1,600 sq ft house weighs about 345,000 lbs, of which 160,000 lbs is from the foundation, and about 30,000 lbs is from the garage. Since Carl lifts off and leaves the foundation behind, that leaves about 155,000 lbs, which is 77.5 US tons or 70,306 kg, which the canopy needs to lift. Accelerating toward the ground at 9.8 m/s², that’s 688,998 N of force from gravity that the canopy has to overcome. With the density of helium at .1786 kg/m³ and representing a balloon as a sphere with a radius of 2.78 ft (like weather balloons), each balloon can generate 4.5 N of buoyant force. To generate at least 688,998 N of force to overcome gravity, you’d need 153,053 helium-filled, 5.56 ft diameter balloons. If you’re trying this with big party balloons, at about one foot diameter, then you’d need a whole lot more: about 26.5 million balloons. None of this takes into account the weight of the balloons themselves or the strings to tie them to the house.

My favorite scene was Carl’s montage at the beginning. It seems like such a simple idea, but I’m sure it was complicated. Can you explain the process of how the montage evolved?

Pete Docter: That was probably the scene I’m most proud of in the film. It came into play early as we developed the story of this guy floating away in his house, and we asked ourselves, “Why is he doing that?” We figured there was some sort of loss or unfulfilled dream that he was trying to make right, and so we came up with the back-story of Carl and his wife.  We initially constructed it as a compressed series of small short scenes, with dialogue and sound effects. Little snippets of life. When Ronnie del Carmen started to storyboard it, we felt like it would be nice to reduce it, simplify it, and take the dialogue out. My parents shot a lot of super 8 movies of our family growing up. Watching them now, 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?”  Or “what happened right before this moment? ” And that feeling was all part of what went into the scene…these really beautiful, little, real-life moments showing the highs and lows of life. Carl’s true adventure was their relationship together.

Were you concerned at all with delivering such an emotional gut-punch so early in the first act?

Bob Peterson: We weren’t concerned as much as we were vigilant. We knew that we were traversing deep emotional terrain early in the film and we wanted to keep that thread of emotion alive as the film progressed. The reason we went so deep was because we wanted the audience to buy that Carl would lift his house and go on such an audacious adventure. We wanted to keep Ellie alive in the second and third acts, as if she were along for the journey, and so we created a few “talismans” to do so – objects with symbolic meanings – such as the adventure book, the house itself, the colorful sash on Russell (and his Ellie-like sense of adventure) and the colorful bird. At the end of the second act, when Carl reads the adventure book, Ellie is there to give him the wisdom to keep going. It was our hope that in keeping Ellie’s spirit alive throughout the film, her passing earlier would be more poignant.

No related posts.