The technical challenges included perfecting a cartoony CG burger that still looked yummy, and striving for those coming at ya 3-D moments.

CM: We wanted him to aspire to a very cool lab that a very well funded super scientist would have but for all the elements to be things that he's made himself. In that sense, he's more like an artist: he created this whole environment out of cardboard and plywood and paint.

PL: And the main relationship in this movie is between Flint, a progressive guy who is trying to make the world a cooler place, and his dad [voiced by James Caan], who's an old-fashioned, blue collar, tackle shop owner who doesn't understand his son and where he's coming from.

BD: And what about the food?

CM: When we designed the food, we knew it had to feel really, really edible and really appealing. But it had to retain a very realistic quality to it and had to work within the cartoony universe of these characters.

PL: The ham is a really good example. It feels like a really delicious cartoon ham.

CM: We tried to make the silhouettes as streamlined as possible, but then [retaining] all the textures and lighting information.

BD: Was there a lot of R&D into getting the food to look right?

PL: There was some, like the interior of the Jell-O mold was very difficult because it was jiggling and warbling and light was refracting.

CM: I think at the time, Rob Bredow [the visual effects supervisor, now elevated to CTO], told us it was the most complex CG set that had ever been attempted [at Sony]. And then they did a lot of work with making the food land and pile up. And they had to build a lot of software to make that feel believable. A cheese burger is a totally different element and you don't want it to feel like a chew toy. It had to flop and the lettuce was treated like lettuce and we ultimately had this giant food avalanche and having them all interact with each other without having something that was hand-animated was a big software challenge.

PL: To make those sims look convincing and also fun and cartoony and to have the right dials on them so that you could keep them from being so realistic that they tend to take you out of the movie was a challenge. And the Imageworks guys were unbelievable.

Lord (l) & Miller compensate for one another, with the former preferring to experiment and the latter preventing him from going off the deep end

CM: And there was a lot of R&D work in designing flexible rigs for the characters because in this cartoon shape they go way off model. Their mouths go really wide or their arms bend where they shouldn't and so they need to make the skeletons in ways they never did before.

PL: And this is the first movie where the Arnold renderer [first used on Monster House] has been employed and been able to do complicated things like millions of hairs where it has to calculate how the light bounces off of every individual hair. But it makes the lighting incredible.

CM: So you wind up setting up scores of lights and there are moments in the movie where you swear that it's natural light.

BD: How do you guys work together and what are your specialties?

PL: We've always been partners on every step of the process. I suppose there are subtle differences in our comedic tastes, but we both trust our opinions on everything.

CM: It's not like one excels more at story and the other at visuals. We both have very strong opinions and it's a complete collaboration from the script all the way through the lighting and the finals.

PL: Most of the time we agree.

BD: Do you both direct the voice actors?

CM: Yes, but we tend to alternate -- it's not good if we talk at the same time.

PL: What's really important in that situation is knowing what we want ahead of time so we're prepared and it's not confusing.

CM: It's almost like being a couple in the way we know what the other is going to say.

PL: You also start to compensate a little bit. I can be more experimental because I know that I have another guy there to stop me from going off the deep end.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.