Shuster is bracing himself for comparisons between the design of WALL•E and the binocular-eyed robot in Short Circuit. But the artist never saw the earlier film.

Shuster: No. Early on designing the interior we had a couple of gag sessions, dreaming up how these people were living and interacting, but my focus was basically the exterior.

Strike: You left Detroit to get away from designing cars and make it to Pixar, where they tell you "we want you to design a lot of automobiles"!

Shuster: I saw what my dad had to do to move up through the ranks at GM. He started really fresh-faced and optimistic, and he drew and designed -- it was really a great job at that time. But he had to sacrifice that in order to go further in the company -- sacrifice the artistic side of things. He had to stop drawing and start managing.

I saw what that did to him. It's not like I had the same idea that I was going to manage at GM. There's only so much you can do and I felt the market was so saturated with auto designers. It was the whole focus of our school in Detroit, the College for Creative Studies. I just thought, why compete with all these people when I can just design spaceships and actually have a really good time and be one of the few people who's doing it?

Strike: I'd think there'd be some competition there too.

Shuster: There is now, with schools pumping out tons of students with a specific entertainment curriculum, but back in the day, 12 or 13 years ago, it was still building to the kind of fever pitch it's at now. Oh man, I just... heard horror stories of fellow grads getting a job at one of the big companies and spending months on one thing like a door handle or a spoiler. My God, it just sounded horrible -- what an existence.

Strike: Usually, it's piecemeal, you get the dashboard, somebody else gets --

Shuster: Yeah, it's by committee.

Strike: Speaking about Cars -- the movie -- they had you designing to be faithful to the real materials. Were you designing any of the lead cars?

Shuster: Being my first project here, my first character design, I worked closely with Bob Pauley, the production designer on Cars, who's been one of John's favorite artists here since Toy Story. [Sighs.] Just working with Bob and discovering this whole new world, and applying my industrial design side to the Disney/Pixar [aesthetic] was just an amazing experience.

Shuster designed the exterior of the Axiom, the luxury spaceliner that is supposed to carry hundreds of thousands of passengers. The challenge was keeping the scale in check.

I designed the tertiary characters -- like Ramone [Cheech Marin's character], all the background cars, the race cars you see on the track, and other characters like Bessie the road paver. She was really fun -- she's not really a character, but she is in a way.

Strike: She's not really sentient like the other cars; basically she's just a machine.

Shuster: But John was determined that she actually work -- I spent months and months on her, making sure she laid down an even layer of tar every time.

Strike: That must be weird -- you can't just fake it, you have to actually think about the mechanics inside a machine like that.

Shuster: Exactly.

Strike: Did you have to pick up any computer animation expertise, or did you have CAD/CAM skills you could apply?

Shuster: I came in cold to the computer thing.

Strike: How much did you have to learn?

Shuster: Actually, nothing, I've used Photoshop forever to do little touch-ups here and there, but I'm pretty much a pen-to-paper kind of guy.

Everything, almost 100% on Cars, was pen-to-paper -- all the ideation, sketching, leading up to the final model packet: the instruction booklet on how to build the characters, inspecting all the details. I would hand off this small bible to the person building it, making sure they knew exactly what was going on in the surfacing of the car and whatnot.

Strike: Did you get called in to look over their shoulders at their work stations? Was it strange to see what they were doing once they took over?