Subtitles section Play video
Hey everyone this is a special episode of Behind The Curtain in honor of
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