Interview with Ralph Eggleston

Pixar’s Process: What Are Sculpts?

QUESTION: David
About the process of making CGI films, I personally always assumed that you went straight from like 2-D drawings, straight to computers, and make it all happen. But as I was walking down at the exhibit here at MoMA, I noticed that there are sculptures. And I was just wondering what role they play in the process.

RALPH EGGLESTON
The sculptures are to see it in 3-D, because we do two-dimensional drawings, and eventually, it will end up in the computer as a two-dimensional image. When you're watching the final film, you're watching a 2-D image, not a 3-D image. In order to see it in the third dimension, we do sculptures, to look at the shape relationships, and scale relationships, how big the eyes are versus how big the hands are.

Uh, it's, it's fast, also. You know, to build it in the computer is very time consuming, and, and often, very...intricate. And you can see the, the characters in 3-D, and, and see what works, and what doesn't work a lot faster.

I mean, I think on [Monsters, Inc.], there was something like... over forty sculptures of Sullivan done. You know. Different character designs. To see what worked, and nothing was working. There was a lot of design work done on that character.

QUESTION: David
With all these, like drawings, and sculptures, and studies of, like, movements, how long does it usually take to make one of these feature films?

RALPH EGGLESTON
I would say that the average, from 1937 to now, has been four years. So, some take slightly longer, very few take shorter.

Pixar’s Process: Artistry or Storytelling?

QUESTION: Austin
Do the artists that you work with, like the animators, and the people who do the storyboards, do they look at it in more of an artistic point of view, or towards the direction of storytelling?

RALPH EGGLESTON
It's all geared towards storytelling. So when I am working on something, in my department or the story department or any of the departments at Pixar, we tend to put ourselves in the theater, before the film starts. And like, I'm going to have entertain an audience for two hours some day. You know, that's the way we think is, how are we going to engage an audience for about two hours. Towards the end of making our films, it's terrifying for me to go to a movie. Because if I get to the movie too soon, and they've just got a blank screen up there, you know. I get scared. I really do. I'm like, oh, God, in three months, we're going to be on the screen. I hope we did a good job, you know. So it's... that's the way we... that's the way I think, and I know a lot of people do, so.

Pixar’s Process: Reaching Children and Adults?

QUESTION: Ani
Most Pixar movies, they reach out to adults and children. How does Pixar come up with such themes and storyboards that actually relate to everybody of all ages?

RALPH EGGLESTON
You know, we... we make films for ourselves. That's how we do it. That's the way we all think. I don't think I've ever been in a meeting where someone said, “well, you know, that's too adult. Let's keep that just for kids,” or, “that's, you know, that's just for kids, let's make it more adult.” I mean the second you start thinking that way, it's the second you kind of lose sight of what you're really doing, which is you're trying to tell an entertaining story. If it's an entertaining story, it's great for children and adults, you know. I think that's the way we like to think. Hopefully we're making a great movie, you know. Hopefully. I mean, we never know. We work really hard on it, you know.

I mean there are instances, for example, we'll screen a film, and test screen it, and we lose the kids. They don't understand something. The audience might get it, but the kids might not quite get it. So we'll go and we'll make it clearer. And we'll make the gag a little bit longer. Or, another instance, even for adults would be, a gag happens, and then something else happens right after that. Or someone speaks right after that on the screen. But the audience is still laughing, so they don't hear that line. So we open it up, we give a little more time. And then we have the line.

Or, uh, after the film, we'll ask people, “What's your favorite character, what's your second favorite character? What's their name?” And if they can't remember their name, we'll go in and sprinkle the name in a few more times more clearly.

Those are the kinds of things that we do address. Those are, again, clarity issues for the audience to be able to understand the story, so.

QUESTION: Mattie
With Finding Nemo, was it as successful as you wanted it to be?

RALPH EGGLESTON
It was far more successful than I ever imagined or wanted it to be. I think the thing that hit the audience about the film, that... that we should have realized that's the reason we made the movie, was that immediate connection between the father and the son. And it was funny to kind of read reviews, and... and hear people say, after the film, that... the majority of the people that saw the film were adults, not kids. Yeah. And it was the adults that actually tended to enjoy the film, even more than the kids. I mean on DVD, of course, kids see it a lot more now.

But in the initial release, it was the adults who responded to the film more. I sat next to this actress at the premiere, and she was with her too-cool eight-year-old son. And he didn't want to be watching this kiddie cartoon. Whatever. And she was there, you know. And she was really, really nice. And, um, so the film went on. He calmed way down. And he wasn't too cool to start crying at the end of the movie. And she was crying, too. And after the movie came up, she just looked at me and says, “That was so wonderful.” And she just hugged her son right then and there. And it was... I mean really, that connection to me was amazing, you know. And I hear that over and over again from parents. You know, they... they enjoyed the film as much as their children, probably more so. You know. So. But it's also true that adults that have kids enjoy it more than adults that don't.

Pixar’s Process: Lighting?

QUESTION: Austin
Do you have a separate lighting department or...

RALPH EGGLESTON
Yes.

AUSTIN
Okay. Do you check with the department?

RALPH EGGLESTON
Yes, a lot.

AUSTIN
A lot?

RALPH EGGLESTON
One of the things as production designer is I do what we call a colorscope, which is just a general map, like the watercolor, of a film. It's like… it's usually like three-by-thirty-inch panels. That just kind of map out the general color of those movie, like twenty or thirty of them on a board. And it just gives everybody a glance of what the film is going to look like when it's done, because then you have to start dealing with the details, and it's easy to forget where you're going if you don't have a map.

So, we start with this as a map. The color script is a map of the color. And then I have a lot of other responsibilities that I have to deal with, but at a certain point we have what's called “master lighting.” And they'll take a scene that takes place in one set and they'll just put basic lights in; get the temperature of the lights right. They're not doing final lighting right now. But what I… what I will do for them at that stage is what we call “sequence pastels,” and I'll take that little piece of the movie that... on the color script, I'll take that and I'll expand on it, you know. And I'll do like five to ten or as many pastels as necessary to kind of explain the lighting of the scene and the mood of the scene and how to light works on the characters. And then I will give those to the lighting people.

AUSTIN
Do they use lighting to express like emotions or a scene?

RALPH EGGLESTON
Absolutely. When we do animation, we don't do animation with lights on. It's done without lighting. It's unbelievable that a lot of our films look as good as they do considering that we didn't use lighting as a compositional element as we were laying the film out. We had a concept and some painting, but the lighting is actually done late in… in the process.

AUSTIN
I imagine that's difficult... rendering the faces and what not. I mean...

RALPH EGGLESTON
It was always depressing to hear, like for me an animator say... you know, when Buzz and Woody are reconciling and Woody's under the crate, I remember hearing an animator saying, "If I'd known how that was going to be lit, I would have animated that differently," you know. And I would say, you know, "Sorry." It's not in my control, so... But we are getting there, you know. It's exciting. I mean we're really excited about the idea of being able to do that sooner.

Pixar’s Process: Do Characters Resemble Actors?

QUESTION: Mattie
In a lot of the animations, in a lot of the... I saw in Monsters, Inc., I saw that, when I saw the actual actor, and the actual cartoon moving and talking at the same time, I'd see that they had a similar characteristic. Like, they'd look alike. How do you get a human feature like you know, a person's big nose, or you know, really wide eyes, or something, or big ears. How would you get that to match that cartoon, that animation?

RALPH EGGLESTON
We don't consciously design characters to look like the stars. It's just not there. It does, by osmosis, happen. And, and, you know, things like Dory. Dory. One of the few things... one of the things about an animated character, the audience looks at the characters eye- the same, true with a live-action films too. You watch the character's eyes.

But someone like Dory, I mean... she's such a thin character, and she's got the fin. That’s not a lot to act with. You know? And her eyes were prominent. We did consciously go in and say, "Well, let's try and make this look like Ellen's eyes," you know? I mean, they're so expressive, and wonderful, and deep, and... and, and if you're gonna, if that's one of the themes you're going to have to latch onto as a character for an audience member, it'd better be as beautiful as hers, you know?

The idea of a forgetful fish, Dory, was spawned from a stand-up routine that Andy saw of Ellen’s late one night on HBO. When she tells her jokes, she tells them in circles, you know? “And then this happened, but, but... and then this happened, but, you know, something like this happened.” And she'd get back to the joke.

And that's what inspired the idea of Dory. So, it was always fun to hear people worry about that. "I don't know, Ellen DeGeneres as a voice? Hmm, weird." But then getting to work on the film and seeing it come to life and seeing how great she was. She was fantastic.

Take… Sullivan in Monsters, Inc., looks like John Goodman. You know, part of it is the voice. The character's voice and who that actor is part of them. And so, I think... it would be an interesting experiment to have uh, a series of voices recorded that uh, the people designing it couldn't see the actor, and know who the actor was, necessarily, and see them design it. And then, show them the actor, and see if the looked like, you know, the actor. I bet you it would.

Pixar’s Process: Is 3-D Animation Easy?

QUESTION: Hector
Are, are you ever frustrated or upset by uh... people kind of just like copying Pixar, thinking that 3-D animation will instantly make it a success?

RALPH EGGLESTON
I do get frustrated, but not because they're doing computer animated films, but because they're doing it for the wrong... often, for the wrong reasons. In that they think just because it's CGI, that's what makes it successful, that's just not true.

I have a book, I stumbled upon this. It's a collection of lectures given to the very first motion picture film class at UCLA in 1927. And uh, the lectures are people like Irving Thalberg, Paul Bern, uh, William Cameron Menzies, I mean, all these giants of early motion picture production. And they were really, really excited about these new things: color and sound. You know? They were real… you know, they, they didn't think they were a fad, but they weren't sure how they were going to fit into how they made movies. And, and the one thing that they all end up saying, and, and these are transcribed lectures, is, you know, it's just not going matter. Because people don't respond to that. They respond to stories. And things that they can identify with. Characters that they can identify with.

And it's the same with computer animation. It's like... they don't care if it's animated by hand or the computer. They really don't. You know? Live action, and stick figures. I've seen animators at Pixar take a stick figure and breathe life into it that is more believable than a lot of live-action films I've seen.

This is funny. It's that they believe that computer animation is... they think... the reason they get into it is because it's cheaper and faster. It's just not true. It's not cheaper, and it's certainly not faster. It’s easier to make changes later, but you really do need to understand the medium. So, I'm, I'm very lucky to work at a studio that believes—and, and not just believes, but they put their money where their mouth is—that story is king. And if it's not working in story, none of the computer, none of the greatest computer anything will make it better.

Eggleston’s Perspective: Were you always interested in art as a child?

QUESTION: Maria Luisia
Were you always interested in art, even as a child?

RALPH EGGLESTON
I was always interested in animation and film. I never thought of it like art. You know? To me, doing the artwork is a means to an end. I want to tell stories.

MARIA LUISIA
But did you start like, sketching... You always had like a sketchbook?

RALPH EGGLESTON
I did. I always... I was always drawing. I was always making little flip books, ruining all my parents' books by making little flip books in the corner. And uh, I begged my parents for a Super 8 camera that could do single-frame. And uh, we'd make clay... little animation films. I grew up in Louisiana, and I was the only one really doing that at my school. And what was really great is that when I finished the film, I got to go show it to other schools. So I got a class at the other school. Because all I wanted to do was make films.

Eggleston’s Perspective: Future of Animation?

QUESTION: Austin
What do you think is the future, not just for Pixar, but for the medium of computer animation in general? What potential do you think it has in store?

RALPH EGGLESTON
Uh, well I think it has limitless potential. I think the only limits to it are how people use it. And, and, and what they say with it, you know? Going back to what I was saying earlier when I paint on the computer, versus working with my chalk pastels, one of the great things about the computer is you can do anything. One of the scary things about the computer is you can do anything.

Because I'm a firm believer in limitations, and setting those boundaries. And uh... and, and those boundaries are the story you're telling. What does the story you're telling call for? That's all you need. I love seeing some of the cool techniques that they’re do in... uh... you know, different kind of brush stroke computer animation, I think it's beautiful.

What stories can you tell that use that as an element to tell the story? And not just as a technique... that you're layering... I think of, when you do that, you tend to use the technique as a barrier between the audience and the story you're telling. You know, the audience is… they become disconnected from the characters because they're having to look through the technique, you know? I don't believe in that. I used to. I used to really want to believe it.

Eggleston’s Perspective: Hand-Drawn vs. CGI?

QUESTION: Hector
Since you said you used to do hand drawn animation when you were younger; when did um, you feel like, you'd move into computer animation?

RALPH EGGLESTON
I never felt that I would.

HECTOR
No?

RALPH EGGLESTON
I remember myself, a woman named Tia Kratter, and a gentleman, Bob Paulie, were put into a room with original staff of Pixar... Tom Porter and William Reeves. Brilliant people. They built the architecture of the computer system that we use at Pixar, and they're like, big, I mean really smart guys. And I just draw cartoons. But they sat there, and we were... we had our little tablets out. We worked furiously. And they said, “This is computer animation, you know, 101. And this is a cube, this is a sphere, and this is a cone. These are the wah wah wah,” in one ear and out the other, because we draw cartoons, right? And they're like, theoretical mathematicians, you know, with ten PhDs. And we walked out of that room, after like six hours, exhausted and terrified. Feeling, how are we going to... we... none of us had worked with a computer before, and we were... we were genuinely terrified, right. And John Lassiter saw us, and I think he must have recognized the look on our faces.

And he just walked to us and he started laughing. And he goes, “You know, just draw a picture. Just... that's why we hired you. Just come in and draw a picture. You know, that's what you do, that's why we hired you. Is... we don't want you to be so afraid of the computer that you aren't creative.” In other words, don't feel bound by what the computer can or can't do. Because the second you are bound by what you think the computer can or can't do, you're going to start designing to that limitation, and we had to push out from there. So he said, don't pay attention to the computer at all. Don't even go there. Just start drawing. Come up with ideas. That's what we want is ideas. And I would sit there and just start doing color studies, and little color sketches, based on where the story was at the time. And that... you know, once I realized that I didn't have to learn everything about how to work the computer, it just freed me. You know, it was amazing.

Eggleston’s Perspective: Advice?

QUESTION: David
What advice would you give to anyone that's attempting to pursue a career in animation?

RALPH EGGLESTON
Learn how to draw.

DAVID
As simple as that?

RALPH EGGLESTON
Learn how to draw. Computer animation, animation, painting... anything. It's not about learning how to draw, it's about learning how to see. When you're looking at something, observing it, what are you seeing through your brain, and your eyes, that you are now translating through your hand to paper? What, what about what you're drawing that you're seeing is individual to you? And learning how to draw that, and see it. You know? That's very important.

Because if you're going to get into the career in the arts, as a fine artist, or as a commercial artist of any kind, a really good idea clearly communicated in a solid drawing will never go out of style. Just, you will always need it. Theatre design, graphic design, car design. Painters. Filmmakers. You know? Costume designers. Uh, architecture. You know, all of the arts. I just think that learning how to draw well is very important. And the techniques of drawing, you can learn that. But learning how to see is something you need to do every day. Lots of people draw every single day. You know?

And, there's a famous quote uh, by Chuck Jones, I believe. He said, "You got a million bad drawings in you. The sooner you get them out, the better." So...

I started out as a traditional animator and uh, fell into doing art direction on a couple of films in Los Angeles, and just kind of doing a little bit of a lot of things. I worked at small companies, commercial companies, where, when you don't have that many people, you tend to do everything yourself. So I was designing, storyboarding, animating, writing what we call exposure sheets, which are frame-by-frame accounts of the exposure of the film. And uh, painting cells, doing my own effects animation. Doing a little bit of everything, you know. And as... as difficult as it was at the time, because I was starving, I... I learned a lot. And I have... friends of mine who are very, very talented animators, and some of the best in the world. And this isn't to say anything negative. I'm not saying that. I'm very impressed with their animation. But I've got friends who've done nothing but animation. And they're very, very good at it. And I wish I could be as good as them at animating. But they didn't get to... or they didn't have to do the other jobs. And, I think that for me, and my job now as production designer, it's a very, very... it's a big advantage. You know, because I... in my job as production designer, I have to deal with so many more elements of the film. And I don't need to know every detail about each one of those elements, but I need to know how they connect more. Sometimes I wish I could just sit in my room and animate, you know, and have somebody tell me what to do. It would be nice.

Eggleston’s Perspective: Pastels or Pixels?

QUESTION: Ani
You created the colorscripts for Finding Nemo and for the first Toy Story, and I was wondering… You've done a classic style. You've hand drawn. And do you think that digital is better because it's… I’ve seen the ones for, uh...

RALPH EGGLESTON
The Incredibles?

ANI
Yeah, The Incredibles.

RALPH EGGLESTON
I don't think any of it is any better or worse. It's just different, a different tool. I... I like working with pastels a lot because it's fast. I really did it only because it was fast for me, faster than on the computer by far. I mean I work on a computer now. The current colorscript I'm doing is going to be on the computer. But the thing I miss about it already is the tactile nature. There's this thing about having this picture in my head and that it's going through my brain and down my arm and out my hand to this piece of chalk and onto this piece of paper. There is something about that that can't be beat to me. It'll never be there. And I don't get the same thing when I'm working on the computer. The problem with the computer is they can do anything. And I have to make that many more... set that many more limitations on myself and I have to really, really, really, really be disciplined. The chalk, I only have X amount of colors and I can blend them and do different things with them, buy that's it. And once I put it down there, that's it. And it's a good thing because it's... it forces me to be much more economical in selling this idea. You know, when I work on the computer, I tend to want to do a little bit more detail, or change this. And I could change it all the time. Well, I don't want to change it all the time. I want to get what's in my head on paper. That's the most important thing because that gut feeling is what matters most, you know. When I sit there and noodle it and put this whole... so I get lost in the noodling and I forget the idea. I'm trying to get the emotion down, not the technique. That's what everybody responds to. That's the only thing people respond to, you know. If I try and make a pretty image, chances are the director is going to come and say "That's not at all what I had in my head," and he'll throw it away. You have no idea how many drawings people do at Pixar every day. There's like... I mean it's amazing how many drawings people do every single day. You know, fifty drawings. And... and you know what they'll end up using for the film? One of those, you know. That's how many... I mean every single day. It's... so if you get precious with it. If you don't get the emotion down and the idea down, it’s not worth your time.

For the Birds, Toy Story, Finding Nemo: For the Birds

QUESTION: Ani
For the Birds was an animation you started working on when you were a student, right?

RALPH EGGLESTON
I was at CalArts, yeah.

ANI
And what made you continue it after you guys at Pixar…

RALPH EGGLESTON
Well, I could tell you what made me stop it at CalArts was that I didn't want to have to draw those birds. They're really simple, but there's a lot of them and you have to do it by hand. I mean I was doing it by hand. I didn't want to have to animate that.

ANI
And did working at Pixar inspire you, since you had another way of creating…

RALPH EGGLESTON
Well, you know what hap... what happened was I was working on Monsters, Inc. and then I moved from Monsters into development, trying to come up with ideas for future movies. And there was... every once in a while, they'd say, hey, we're looking for some short films. Anybody got some ideas, you know? And they said, you know, we're going to have some pitches; some people bring their ideas and then pitch them. And I said, well, I've got this old idea. Let me see if anything happens. And I just kind of roughly boarded it out and went in and pitched it. And the next morning, they said, "We're making your short film," really, you know. I still had to figure out... That was the other reason I didn't make it when I was a student is that I couldn't think of an ending. I had to reboard the ending probably twenty or thirty times because it just wasn't funny. It was not funny. It wasn't working.

One of our story artists, Joe Ramft, had a terrific idea for me. We couldn't use it, unfortunately, but he said, "Oh, at the end, you know what we should have?" And he did these little drawings. And I just laughed so hard. He had a bunch of mad rabid weasels jump out of the weeds and eat the little birds. The end. I had an idea of, you know, the birds get shot up and then this bucket lands and then these pieces of fried chicken land in the bucket.

For the Birds, Toy Story, Finding Nemo: Making Nemo’s World?

QUESTION: Hector
With Finding Nemo, how did you choose some of the color schemes? Particularly the underwater scenes, it’s really dark. I mean how do you…

RALPH EGGLESTON
Well, we all took scuba diving lessons and we all went scuba diving. And one of the early kind of warnings I was given, just a general warning that when an audience is subjected to a lot of dark scenes in a film over a long period of time, it can get really depressing. And it's true. It is true. But for me, in terms of choosing the color, it was a matter of then how do you let the audience know where you are in the course of the story and of the film? And I said, well, Father and Nemo live in the Great Barrier Reef. It's probably pristine and clean and clear and you can probably see further. And then the closer you get to the city, the murkier the water will get. In San Francisco Bay you get the surge and swell of the tide as soon as all the sand kicked up, so it's murkier and greener. So, I decided that... that's it right there. Humankind has murkier, dirty... I don't want to say dirtier, but murkier water, and it's definitely greener.

And then Paradise, where Father and Nemo live, is clearer and shows a turquoise color. And if you watch the film, over the course of the film the water color changes. You know, the further he gets from home, the deeper it gets and the bluer it gets, and it becomes a very, very intense blue. Once he meets Dory and they get to the jellyfish and meet the turtles, it actually starts turning turquoisy-green. And then as you get to Sydney, the water is definitely denser and greener. And over the course of the film, as well. The film starts very, very clear.

And then as they get closer to Sydney, the water gets murkier and murkier, you know? So, that... that was our... I call it a clothesline. That was... that was the hook, that was the idea. Every time we cut from the dentist's office back to the ocean and back and forth, you would know, oh, they travelled further, you know. So, that's how we came up with it.

QUESTION: Ani
The graphics of Finding Nemo are amazing. Um, some of the scenes in the water are so realistic, and some of the animals. What was the most difficult?

RALPH EGGLESTON
I think different departments would probably say different things. But I think the overall most difficult thing was the idea of water. Not just making water move like water. That was very difficult. But making characters feel as though they were in a volume of water. And with a surge and a swell of tide, and currents. And particulate matter. And light beams coming through that. And reacting on the characters. And the density of the water. From camera to the distance. How do you... you know, it was very, very difficult. You know. And uh, it wasn't any one of those elements that made you believe that there's water. It was exactly the right amount, of a lot of elements, that made the audience believe that you were under water, including sound. You know, Gary Rydstrom’s sound design in that film is, I think, brilliant. You know, the... when you're above water, you hear the ambient sound of the world.

And the second you go under water, I mean the way the sound is designed, you feel like you're under water. Um, so yeah. It's a lot of the little elements. But... but if any one of those elements was too much or too little, it threw it off balance. Sometimes the particulate matter, the little bits of stuff in the water, it started looking like snowflakes. You know. And uh... it was hard. It was very difficult.

For the Birds, Toy Story, Finding Nemo: Sid vs. Andy?

QUESTION: Luisa Maria
In Toy Story, you use a really punk, black Converse, to make an evil character. And then a really sweet boy, with clouds all around his room, and really artistic, as a good boy. In a way. How did you work with those elements?

RALPH EGGLESTON
You know, it was a contrast. It's like Sid was the bad kid. Everybody's got a... one of those neighbors, you know. It's like there's always one of those weirdo neighbors, And he tortures the toys. It's all about telling a story. Really, it was. It was like Andy, you know. Overly saintly. And... but the world... for me, the design of that room, really was about the toys, and the idea about the toy world. What will it be? Oh, primary colors. And some secondary colors. And then Sid's world would almost be monochromatic. Or just dingy, dark colors. Things like that. That's where it started. It didn't start... I didn't start out thinking it was stereotypical. But I... if you look at Andy's house versus Sid's house, one of the other interesting things you'll notice is, Sid's house... I mean we thought through their parents. His parents are there. And we said his dad, we were laughing about somebody's dad, I think it was, trying to be a handyman. And he wasn't very good at it.

And... but we started laughing, that's Sid's dad. That's Sid. You know. So if you look at Sid's house. Every window is different. It's a... because you've got Spanish windows, English Tudor style. It's like ten different styles on that house. And it's because the dad would start a project, thinking it... he probably read in some magazine. Oh, that would be really cool on this house. And then he started doing it, and then he got tired of doing it, so he never finished it. There's lots of unfinished pieces on Sid's house. Versus Andy's house. Which is fairly... fairly well together, you know.

LUISA MARIA
But then this is also something that passed to another generation. Like, he started this... like, breaking up a toy. And he never finished, so...

RALPH EGGLESTON
Yeah. Yeah. It's... I mean that's what we... we thought through the characters, and their family relationships, and why the house was a certain way. The front lawn's not mowed. You know.

LUISA MARIA
Do you work with any psychologists in your... as part of your team?

RALPH EGGLESTON
Uh, not really. You know, we'll find things that we know. Lots of people at work have many different relatives. And they'll tell a funny story about the relative. I mean, I used to do that. I used to, like, melt my sister's Barbie dolls, together, because I thought it was real cool. I thought I could make an alien. You know. And it's fun. I mean it's like imaginative. It's like one day, we had a... some real important people coming through Pixar for some tour. Something or other. And I was out front with a magnifying glass, burning a hole in a doll's head. Because I wanted to see what would happen, if I did that.

What would it... what would the plastic be, you know? And it was the smell was really bad. You know. But it was fun. I love evil characters. I think my favorite out of all the Pixar villains is definitely Sid Phillips because I think he's the most like me. That's not why I like it so much, but it's because I can identify with him most. You know, I totally get that. I used to sell fireworks, so I always had extra fireworks that I would... you know, when I was making my Super 8 movies, you know, when I was growing up, I could get some fireworks and put them under my little model airplanes and I would film them blowing up. My friend and I would always make slasher movies when I was in high school, you know, and if we ran out of red food coloring, we would have green food coloring. And then we’d call our film “Green Blood,” you know? They were terrible, but we had fun making them. That's how we filled our summers.

For the Birds, Toy Story, Finding Nemo: Talking Fish?

QUESTION: Mattie
In Finding Nemo, Dory constantly forgets everything that she's learned in like two seconds. What type of fish is she and do those fish actually really do have short memories?

RALPH EGGLESTON
It's a blue tang, and I really don't think they have short-term memories. I don't think they think that far in advance to have that short of a memory. They're... they're beautiful fish and that... No, I don't really... I really don't know.

QUESTION: Ani
With a lot of the characters in Finding Nemo, a lot of them have different accents and they have a lot of human characteristics, such as memory loss, short-term memory loss. And I forget the original name of the fish, but the one who had a twin, Flo, when she saw her reflection.

RALPH EGGLESTON
Flo & Deb. Deb & Flo.

ANI
Um, yeah, Deb. Why'd you guys choose to make them so human?

RALPH EGGLESTON
There's a weird thing going on with those fish. One of the things that the director was adamant about was not overly anthropomorphizing them, not giving them hands, and they don't get up on their fins and talk or tap dance or whatever. They're fish. And he was really adamant about that. When we talked to a lot of animators early on during the process, they... they not only feel like they do, but they actually will eventually need things like shoulders and jaws and eyebrows. But how do you keep that and keep it subtle enough so that we don't lose the quality of the fish? I mean the fish in Nemo moved like the fish that they are very, very specifically. The father’s a clown fish and Dory’s a blue tang. Every fish moves differently. But in order to tell a story and communicate to an audience, you do need something that they can latch on to and what humans latch onto is human experiences. That's why we use humans, you know.

QUESTION: Ani
A lot of the fish speak... a lot of the animals, the seagulls don't speak and neither do the jelly fish…

RALPH EGGLESTON
Mine, mine…

ANI
I mean they don't speak like humans in the movie itself, and neither does the whale or the jelly fish. And why did you guys choose to do that?

RALPH EGGLESTON
Again, the story. Whatever story... Honestly, it's what does the story need? Jellyfish don’t talk, c’mon, but neither do fish. I always get the other question, like I don't understand, how could they - fish couldn't really put themselves in a plastic bag and escape out of a window. And I'm like, you know, they’re talking, you know, fish don’t talk. It really is about the story needs. I mean it... I think it's funnier to hear Dory speak Whale anyway.

For the Birds, Toy Story, Finding Nemo: First Movie?

QUESTION: Mattie
In working with Pixar, what was your first title, and what was the first movie that came out? And how did you feel when it first came out?

RALPH EGGLESTON
I... kind of tying these two questions together. I didn't... I started out in traditional animation, and I... had a friend of mine, Andrew Stanton, who was the writer and director of Nemo, and written on all of our films, just... a friend of mine. He called me up one day and said, hey, we're working on this new thing called Toy Story. Are you interested? And I'm like... I didn't have... I had a job at the time, but it wasn't really working out. And I said, sure. You know. At the time, computer animation was a lot flying... what we call flying logos, and a lot of metal, shiny things. And the camera was... no one was using it to tell a story. You know. And I had... I knew Joe Ramft, and John Lassiter, peripherally, just through, you know, just around. And I knew Andrew very well because we had gone to school together. And I know that one thing that they knew how to do is tell a story. And if that's what they were going to do, I wanted to be part of it. So I said sure. I went up... like two weeks later I was up there. And art directing a film called Toy Story, which I knew nothing about. I mean really, nothing.

I would have friends call me, and say, what are you working on, you know. And I said, oh, I don't know, I'm working on this thing called Toy Story. It's a computer-animated film. Oh, a computer-animated film, right? Mmm hmm. Yeah. Right. Okay. Yeah. You know. And nobody believed it. And traditional animation, the production is a little bit more linear. You do some drawings. You do rough drawings. You clean the rough drawings up. You paint the... the cleaned-up drawings. You paint a background, you put it on the background and film it. So you see it happening in front of you a lot more. And computer animation, I think of it as you design a car. And everybody looks at the car and says, yeah, that's a cool car. Let's build it. And then all of the individual departments come and grab their part of the car. And they take it... their design. And they take it, and they build it separately. And then over a course of three to four years, you start putting it back together. And you put a key in it and you start it and you pray that it works. But you don't see the end result until about eight months before the movie comes out. Uh, it's scary, you know. Um, one of our directors said it's like, well, I wrote a screenplay, and I had some designs. And then for the next three years, people lobbed questions at me. And I threw answers back at them. But it felt like I was just lobbing them into a black hole. You know. And I... is anything coming out of there, do you know? And finally about eight months, nine months before the film was finished, you start seeing a scene here, and a scene there, finished, the way it's going to be on the screen. It's scary. Because you just don't know if it's going to work. You know. So. It's thrilling. It really is thrilling. At the end of Toy Story, when I finally saw a whole, like two minutes. Just two minutes of eighty minutes of the film, together on the screen. I honestly had the feeling that I had not worked on that film. I'm like, where did that come from? Did I have anything to do with that? You know. It was really weird. Uh, and then going to the premiere, you know? It was really weird.

There’s a sound designer on the film, was Gary Rydstrom. And uh, the screenwriter, one of the screen writers, Joss Whedon. And we sat next to each other, at the premiere, and uh, it's like, the sound, at that time, at the theater was... I mean it wasn't... was not great. wasn't great. And then, you know, so it was like Gary was kind of like this, you know. And Joss was like this. And I was like... we were like the three monkeys, you know, like. Because we were nervous. What are people going to think of this, you know? It was funny.

QUESTION: David
Where do you get inspiration for all of these stories?

RALPH EGGLESTON
We have... all over the place. It's amazing where ideas come from. Andrew Stanton, director and writer of Finding Nemo, was uh at an aquarium, with his son. And actually, the original idea for Finding Nemo was, he was walking with his son, who was younger at the time. And his son didn't look both ways before crossing the street. And he grabbed him, and pulled him back, and started yelling at him, “Don't do that,” you know.

And he realized, whoa whoa whoa, that's a situation where you do need to be over protective, his son was old enough to know better. He should have really looked both ways before he crossed the street, and a car was coming, right? And then, not long after that, he was at an aquarium. And, so those two ideas kind of connected. And we were look... we always try and find ideas that are uh... best told in the medium of computer animation, you know. All of our stories could have been done in traditional animation. But they couldn't have been done and told as well. We couldn't have used the medium... things like scales, and the way a light plays on... it would have been a lot more difficult to do in traditional animation. And not as effective, really, you know? We have guys at work that that's their job, is to sit there and stare off into space, and come up with ideas for movies, you know. They'll be reading a book, or they'll see a painting, or they'll just go traveling, and see something, you know?

Um, all of our ideas are developed in-house.