Inside Pixar

Okay. Question. Do you know who this is?

This is the character Shuri from the movie Black Panther.

The actor who played Shuri is Letitia Wright.

Right? Huh?

And this is Alexander Hamilton.

But it's not really Alexander Hamilton,

because he's been dead since 1804.

The actor who plays him is Lin-Manuel Miranda.

See, character. Actor.

Character. Actor.

Now, this is Cruz Ramirez.

Come on! Show me what you got!

She sounds like me 'cause I'm part of that

character-actor equation.

I'm the voice actor. So who did the rest?

It's these people. That's right.

Every single one of them animated Cruz.

Which makes me wonder, "How does this animation thing work?"

Seriously, real question here.

Well, we kinda like to think of ourselves as puppeteers.

Remember The Sound of Music?

Yeah...

Well, we're kinda like the von Trapp kids.

Making legs walk, making cheeks puff, making necks grow...

Huh. Did you pull the strings on Cruz?

I did.

And you? - Yes, I did. Yeah.

And you, too? - I was on maternity leave.

So how did it go? Was I easy to work with?

Your voice had so much for us to grab onto when we were making our acting choices.

"You should breathe and stretch a bit first."

Use that!

So, break it down for me. What is animation?

Animation is breathing life into something that otherwise wouldn't.

It's making a still model in the computer move around and act.

Whoa...

A lot of people think we're doing drawings,

and somehow, those drawings get turned into computer images,

but what we're doing, it's more like a puppet that's inside your computer.

When you watch a puppet show, you're not really watching

a person controlling a puppet, you believe that puppet is alive.

It's sort of the same thing in animation.

We're puppeteering these characters,

and you believe it because we've put that truth into their acting.

Okay, so, I get that you're, like, a puppeteer,

but what are you actually doing as an animator?

If you were to walk in and see me animate, it would seem pretty boring.

You would just see two characters on a screen

and, like, a buncha numbers, these curves.

But if you were inside of me animating,

all of the values and the channel boxes, that would all fade away.

You would just see the performance.

When I'm doing my work, it happens so slowly that it doesn't quite

feel like all of a sudden it's alive and moving around on its own,

'cause you have to understand, it's very tedious

to get it to even move around at all.

We're still talkin' about playing with puppets, right?

What's tedious about that?

So you think of our films as, like, 90 minutes of glorious animation,

but for us, it's 90 minutes

but in each minute, there's 60 seconds,

and in each second, there's 24 poses.

So if you take 24 times 60 times 90,

that's sort of what we're doing.

Is that the right math?

Actually, that's 129,600 poses in a movie, on average.

But who's counting? (CHUCKLES)

Now, what's a pose?

If you go into, like, an art museum, those are still images.

That one pose that those artists created tells a story.

So I feel like, to really break down posing,

we should bring out one of our Pixar friends.

So this is Jack-Jack.

And you can tell right away from this pose on Jack-Jack,

that Jack-Jack is happy.

His eyebrows are up and his mouth is open in a smile.

And in contrast,

there's this Jack-Jack.

And this Jack-Jack, obviously, got his cookie taken away.

Because his eyebrows are down, he's got a squint on his face.

He's got a little purse of his lip.

You guys are really into eyebrows.

We talk a lot about eyebrows, because it's the windows to your soul.

There's, like, so much emotion you can get with these two lines.

You know, if I'm, like, very focused right now...

There's just something very, very relaxing.

So, they really are tools that we use and lean on

to showcase that inner dialogue and emotion.

Okay, puppets, check.

Posing, check. Eyebrows, double check.

Now, when does the voice come in?

Well, the voice actors are the first ones to perform.

So, we're listening to your voice when we're animating.

"No, you have to win, Miguel."

Sometimes, we watch

the performances of the actors reading the lines.

"...back into my life."

Then we can incorporate some of that into our shots.

"You forgettin' something, Joey?"

This is probably something they started when Joey was little. It's that...

"Come here, give your auntie a kiss," and he never grew out of it.

Kiss her.

We get a recording along with

a storyboard shot of that acting performance.

For me, when I go into my planning,

much of it is, like, getting inside the character's head.

Now you're talking my language.