BD: What about the color palette?

PS: I always wanted the short to take place in a day: it starts in the morning and ends in the evening. But Noah Klocek, the production designer, brought it to life with the pastels that he had done so that morning and sunset can look exactly the same. So he caricatured it to look really warm and golden for that classical drop of the storks and toward the evening to come up with a look that is its own kind of world. It's so abstract that you want it to be believable, but you also want to caricature it so that every time you saw those colors it would be iconic in a way. And then Tim Best and his lighting crew translated that and brought it a whole new level. It was really surprising for us because there were so many times when we were working that we don't even see the clouds above or Gus in the cloud form. When the lighters come in, which are the last few months, that's we finally get to see Gus and the world.

The pastel color palate moves from sunrise to sunset over the course of the short, keeping the look iconic but also abstract enough to look believable.

BD: And what about the storks?

PS: I really love the Dumbo storks in the beginning and was trying to get that realistic feel. There are really two Dumbo storks: the realistic storks in the beginning and the cartoony stork that actually delivers Dumbo. It was a mixture of both extremes: the realistic and finding how to caricature the stork's eyes to get the appealing faces from far away when they're flying in.

BD: And the babies?

PS: It was funny because JL kept saying to make them as cute as possible, even the more dangerous animals, because you want them to be the cutest things you'll ever see. We really tried pushing them and caricaturing them and that's what sold them.

BD: And your mother was obviously a big influence.

PS: Ultimately, the spine really came from my mother and me, trying to find our relationship through growing up in New York. That was something I always came back to during the making of the short. How would my mother feel about that? Or how would she react to that? Yeah, that was a big deal. I should tell her that, actually, before she sees it...

And a lot of inspiration really came from the team here. There were some problems that I didn't have the answers to, so the Pixar family of John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton and Bob Peterson and Pete Docter and Brad Bird were always there to fuel a different kind of inspiration.

BD: What were some of their ideas?

PS: John Lasseter was always pushing the pain stuff with Peck. For instance, how the lamb cloud was a porcupine underneath it. He thought it was funny that it would look like one thing and turn it into something else. Andrew really helped me out with the performances and selling ideas from beginning to end because one of the challenges with a short is to keep the jokes and character beats clear through every level. "Is his idea that he looked up to another cloud still selling?" And then with animation going into lighting: "We need to brighten that background so that his feather cutouts pop out." Andrew always says, "Know where your audience is and know where you're at with what you're showing." The rhythm is like a poker hand -- don't reveal what you have all at once.

Gus thinks even his most dangerous babies are loveable.

BD: And what was it like working in 3-D?

PS: We've just done some of the right eye rendering the last couple of weeks, and that's what forms the 3-D. That world of 3-D has been really amazing. It's fun but it's a whole other set of challenges. You really feel like you're up in the sky in 3-D. It falls really far back in the depth, but you also want to focus where the audience's eyes go, and sometimes Gus' shoulder will be way in the foreground and you'll start looking at his shoulder instead of [what we want you to focus on]. It's a real balancing act of where the focus plane lies on the 3-D. But it was very successful and it's a really crazy thing to fly up there in the clouds in 3-D. 07

BD: One last thing: What was it like serving as the inspiration for the little boy, Russell, in Up?

PS: Yeah, that was really early on when I was boarding it. They did these drawings and the [initial] inspiration was me and Pete Docter's neighborhood friend, Russell, an actual kid in his town. I did a lot of scratch voice for it early on... there were some mannerisms that they would catch, but the resemblance with me as a kid is pretty much where it ends. It is such a family at Pixar: you pretty much want to talk about movies and nerd out with these guys all the time.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.