Toy Story 4 coming out this Friday. I have teamed up with some other

youtubers to create Pixar Perception. All of us have picked our favorite Pixar

movies to analyze and you can watch the other videos in the playlist. I'll have

the link down below and you can make a video to pick a scene from your favorite

Pixar movie Use the hashtag Pixar perception and tag

Network 19:01 and then you'll be added to the playlist if you're new to my

channel instead of giving my own theories on film I shape my videos

around what the creator's themselves have to say now let's get this video

started

I think at the heart of it always is the story and that was something that John

Lassiter understood from the very beginning was look we could have the

most amazing groundbreaking visuals and animation and everything but if we don't

have a good story than seven minutes people are gonna walk out of the theater

Bob Peterson who's co-writer and co-director he and I just always thought

it would be fun to do something with a grouchy old man somebody with a lot of

attitude and personality you know this guy who would haven't it like my

grandfather did you know he would tell you whether you it was a popular thing

or not he would tell you what he thought you know and that's the way Carl is and

we wanted to have a real change that happens to him that by the end he's not

shut in and boxed in his little house he's now stretching out and connecting

with people around him again hmm that's really the message of the film if you

will the relationship we have with other people is really what makes life worth

living Karl's doing this weird thing of dragging his house across the world why

right it's got to be a pretty strong reason and we hit on this idea of

adventure as being either something you travel to and reach out for or it's

something more personal and inside and that was the spine of the film yeah we

have the idea that Carl would lose his first family his wife passes away he

goes off to do something that she wanted to complete and then we give him a new

family and that it just was up to Carl to accept them or not and then that was

basically the why he could take in the second act he could either go along on

this false quest to the Falls or start accepting new people and into his lives

which is what if Ellie would have wanted anyway that might sound boring but I

think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most

all your surrounding characters your side characters have to magnify or put

your main character in contrast also have to push them forward along this

journey or Thor you don't need them at all each side character has an empty

quest that they're going on but they act as kind of mentors for Carl

when Russell says you know it's the it's the boring things I remember he's

talking about his empty Qwest with his father but it's also

something that goes into Carl's head and helps him push him along and then

thereafter what happens is we screen it everybody who we invited comes up to a

room and tells us what they liked what they didn't like and we then the

creative team kind of the core creative team goes away and says what do you guys

think of it what should we do how do we want to change this and just and then we

do that whole thing all over again and we do it about seven or eight times

before the film is really ready to produce well that was one of the great

pleasures for me in working on Toy Story and the success of Toy Story was that I

got to meet these heroes of mine like Frank Thomas and Joe grant as you

mentioned one thing he always more than once would mention is what are you

giving the audience to take home and that always kind of puzzled me at first

but as we talked about it I realized what he meant was

okay there's all the fun of bright colors and movement but what the next

day or in two months are people going to think about that is in your film the

more particular and specific you are in the storytelling the more generally it

applies right if you try to generalize then nobody really gets anything but if

you're very specific and personal about it it seems to resonate more story is

kind of the way we speak I think it's why we go to the movies you know it's

why we listen to stories because you want these bigger questions and in a way

I think the interesting ones are unanswerable you know when they're

really difficult and there's no quite 100% satisfactory ending your answer to

it well we knew we needed something for the audience to be on board with Carl's

journey you know he goes on this really pretty wild fantastic thing of floating

his house down to South America and so you really need to be on board with that

emotionally not just intellectually and so Bob wrote the scene which initially

was a series of small very short scenes of little snippets of the two of them

discussing what their for dinner or fixing the car or whatever

little scenes and then we gave it to Ronnie del Carmen who is our head of

story who boarded it and I think initially he boarded it just the way we

wrote it but I remember him saying something about you know this would play

really great with no dialogue and we eventually tried that and once we did we

just went all the way let's take all sound effects out and nothing but just

music and to me it sort of brought to mind a lot of us grew up with our

parents taking home movies of us you know super 8 movies and there's

something very emotional about watching those and all you hear is the flicker of

the projector and you're sort of drawn in trying to imagine what what's mom

talking about there and you know what happened right after that one dad cut

and so it was kind of a fee that feeling that we were trying to get you know we

did skew very and sort of emotional and we did skew toward toward the farcical

and for me it was partly because Carl was going on a journey that a little

girl had conjured in her younger days she wanted to go to this this place and

in Paradise Falls and you know talking dogs and and in giant birds you know

there's sort of our little girl's fantasy and that's one thing that I

always kind of liked about that but you know I do I do think we did keep the

emotional alive we were after Ellie passed away we try to think what

talismans we could keep to make it feel like she was there almost guiding this

and so the symbolism of the house her picture the adventure book the grape

the you know the grape soda it all sort of kept her alive and then that's my

favorite thing that adventure book the fact that it means her sort of quest for

adventure at the beginning but then at the very end it's her giving him wisdom

of what he can do with his life that same object does two different things

and I really loved that we discovered early on that the story we were telling

was basically about what real adventure in life is and you know how also often

we think of adventure as travel to exotic places and seeing fantastic

creatures and sights that no one else has seen and really what Karl comes to

discover is that the thing that adventure really is

is this wonderful relationship that he had with his wife and so even though he

not he never got the former he definitely had the the latter and we

needed to show that in the movie

hey everyone thanks for watching if you're an aspiring screenwriter I have

something really cool for you so my friend Tyler Mari has created a Facebook

group specifically for screenwriters in this group we brainstorm ideas we give

and receive feedback and we learn about the writing process together it's

extremely beneficial and it's completely free so I highly recommend that you join

it I'm a moderator over there so I will see you there as always if you have a

film or TV show that you'd like me to make a video on just comment it down

below I'll see you guys next week as we take another look behind the curtain