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JM: For example, he had the idea that when Tiana is at the sugar mill that maybe her mother could bring her father's gumbo pot as a sort of house warming present. It's a way of her endorsing her daughter's dream. We had issues earlier where sometimes her mother seemed like she'd be too much of a dream killer because she was always the voice of reason. I think it was John's idea to give her that flier when she was a kid to really help carry her dream forward. These helped create longer lines for the characters in their emotional journey.

BD: By contrast, you had a situation with Bruce Smith where his idea for a very vicious death of a character was rejected.

RC: Well, that brings up a point about something we now do at Disney, where, like at Pixar, we screen the animation every day together with all the animators. It's a free forum where everyone critiques and we make decisions on what to do, and when everyone saw that scene, Bruce was kind of shocked at the reaction. It was a great scene but it went too far.

BD: What are you doing next?

RC: We're planning another hand-drawn film. And it's in very early stages right now and we presented some ideas to John that he liked and we're involved in the promotion of this here and overseas, and when that's over we're going to embark on that. But there other hand-drawn films planned ahead of us [beginning with Winnie the Pooh] and our hope is that hand-drawn will continue. That's always been the hope and the intention.

BD: And are you looking to do another fairy tale musical or something else?

RC: It's a little early but some are fairy tales and some are not.

BD: And what is Ed Catmull's contribution in helping with a more efficient pipeline, including going paperless?

RC: We tried going paperless on this movie, actually, and we did do paperless effects animation and that worked out. But with rough animation and cleanup there were problems and it didn't seem to be practical with this movie, so we went with hand-drawn on paper. But paperless could happen in the future. Ed's a great guy and is one of the smartest men in the world and is a problem solver and had a great impact on this film. It's a very ambitious movie and was done very efficiently, which is good for the future of this medium given the economic environment that we're in.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.