Last week, as previously mentioned, I had the opportunity to speak over the phone with Peter Sohn, Pixar animator and story artist, voice of Emile in
Ratatouille, and now director of Pixar's latest theatrical short film
Partly Cloudy, which arrives in theatres on Friday with
Up. A record of our conversation.
_____
Mike: My first question —and you’ve talked about this before— is about how you got the idea to do a short based on the classic ‘babies come from storks’ fable or whatever. Give readers a brief history.Peter Sohn: Okay. The idea started a long time ago. The actual spark of it started when I was a kid in New York. My mom took me to go see
Dumbo, and I remember there’s an opening to that film where the storks deliver all the babies. And as a kid I really was wondering where did they get all the babies from. And I had this idea that because they were birds they flew to the clouds in the sky, that’s where all the babies came from.
And later, I mean, like a year and a half ago was when I really started fleshing that idea out, when I was pitching it to John Lasseter. He really liked the idea, and then I started really fleshing out the characters and the actual story of what happens. But it was something that was just a seed for a long time until I got to plant it here at Pixar a couple of years ago.
M: Were you told the story as a kid? Did you believe it? (laughing)
PS: It wasn’t about believing, it’s just all I really, kind of, knew as a kid. Like, I remember, that’s where —like if we wanted a pet that’s where the pet would come from, you know what I mean? [But] then it was really fast after learning where babies [actually] come from.
It was such a innocent thing watching
Dumbo. And there have been several other stories of stork delivery mistakes but I didn’t really want to go there I wanted to explore the other end of it, and try to find something new about the story.
M: In an interview you did with the AWN, you mentioned that you pitched a couple of other short ideas the were rejected in favour of Partly Cloudy
. You can’t say what those were, can you?PS: No, but what’s interesting is that they were thematically different from
Partly Cloudy. I mean, they all had different, kind of, tones to it. It’s interesting because I’ve seen it paired with
Up several times and I’m very proud that it works with
Up thematically.
M: I haven’t seen Partly Cloudy
yet but I know that there’s some very cute babies that were designed that way at John Lasseter’s suggestion. Give me other specific examples of his involvement in the film. PS: Sure. Like in animation, when we first started animating the clouds, there was a very, kind of, interesting thing that was going on because what clouds feel like —they should feel like they’re slow, and kind of undulating, and we did a lot of animation like this, but John was like the short needs to be snappy and have a good clip to it, have a great rhythm to it as well.
So you need to balance both the undulation and the snappiness of the cloud animation, and a great way to figure that out is if you think about it, like, with the overshoot, with the overlapping animation, it doesn’t snap back like a rubber band. It stays out there and slowly comes back. So he really —this was during the animation process— where he would have ideas like that to hone us to the proper kind of animation look.
Pixar is very, very critical of finding the character and the style of movement that it needs and with Gus the main cloud we did several tests to try and find it and John was a real, real, you know, prolific part of that.
M: The design of Russell in Up
was based in large part on you —you as a kid. Did anybody in particular serve as inspiration for Gus and Peck?PS: Yeah, it’s my mother and I, hilariously enough. I mean, because of the language barrier between my mother and I —and my father— but my mother is where I got my film love from, my mom is a great film lover. She grew up in Korea watching old American movies, and when I grew up she showed me all those movies. But what’s funny is that when we used to go theatre she wouldn’t understand the English and so I would be there translating a lot of the movies for her.
And that was the kind of relationship that I was really trying to find in this —a bird and a cloud both not able to really communicate with each other —oh, no, they can communicate with each other but the whole thing is about a miscommunication where one thing meant something else.
It really —when I made that the foundation, when I was having story issues, I would just go back to, well, How would I react to this if my mom said it this way or if I did this: If I left my mom, if we were having lunch and I went to go talk to someone else for a second. Would she think that I was, like, ignoring her, or what would she think at that point? And I always would go back to that.
M: As director, how excited would you be to get an Oscar nomination for Partly Cloudy
, which seems likely?(surprised) Ohh! Yeah, absolutely, it would be very exciting. I’m just living off the high of —I had just shown it to a crowd in Austin, Texas maybe a couple of weeks ago and just having people seeing it— cause I’ve shown it here to some story guys and we just had it premiere and it had a great response— but having [regular] people watch it, it’s like no other feeling you’ll ever have.
Just hearing an audience really connect to it and laugh at something, you know, really, really enjoying something that took a while, that a whole crew put their heart into, is the most satisfying thing. I mean, have you made any films? Do you know what I’m talking about?
M: No, I haven’t. That’d be like a dream for me, but...PS: Really, it’s quite a feeling, just for that [the audience response], and that is something I’ll hold on to forever.
M: Do you see yourself ever helming a feature for Pixar? Is it a dream for you?
PS: Um, yeah. Yeah, sure. Right now, it’s just, I have my ideas that I’m still kind of putting into pots, growing the seeds. When they’re ready to really grow, I’ll show somebody.
__________
Special thanks to Amanda Sorena and the Pixar publicity team for arranging the interview and certainly to Peter Sohn for agreeing to talk to me
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