The filmmakers had to visually define the present and future time periods. They referred to Disney animation from the ‘50s as the present while in the future things zip around like Warner Bros. cartoons.

After six months of boarding the movie and putting them up on reels, production began in 2004 with a crew of 350. Given Joyce's retro style -- influenced by everything from Technicolor movies to '40s architectural design -- Anderson and his design team looked for dramatic contrasts to depict the present and future. According to art director Robh Ruppel, who studied, among other things, the way cinematographers Vittorio Storaro (Reds) and Caleb Deschanel (The Natural) handle period looks, the philosophy could be summed up thusly: "We know that Lewis' answer lies in the future. Every time he thinks about the past, every time he gets further from his answer, we pull more color out. Every time we go into the past, we pull most of the blues and the higher saturated colors out. The present is in between those worlds, color wise: it's very warm, it's nice; we save those blue notes for the future: the blue sky, the bright magentas. In the shape design, we tried to keep the present day very boxy and square. Everything's on a grid, everything's a little repetitive, everything's a little busy. So that when you go to the future, the view is unobstructed, the building shapes are very curved. There's pleasantness to it." And there's a wonderful evil future dominated by Doris, the mechanical bowler hat, inspired by Ruppel's childhood memories of Pasadena, Texas: "an oil refinery town, which is very grimy and smoky, so we just exaggerated that where there is no human touch. It's just one big giant factory."

However, Joyce's simultaneous work as production designer on Robotsmeant that certain stylistic adjustments had to be made. "When Robots came out, Bill was very good to steer us away from any similarities," Anderson adds. "For Todayland, which is our homage to Walt Disney's Tomorrowland, think about an iPod instead of a metallic future. We talked a lot about Apple products: a lot of gel-like material, a lot of glass, a lot of soft stucco. Soft, happy, puffy clouds, blue skies and bubbles." As opposed to the present, which has "textures like brick and concrete and hardwood floors and rusty pipes -- earth tones."

Every time Lewis thinks about the past, the filmmakers pulled more color out, especially the blues and the higher saturated colors.

Meanwhile, Meet The Robinsons was obviously more ambitious than Chicken Little because it marked the first time WDFA tackled CG humans: "We knew our movie was going to be less cartoony than Chicken Little and a little more like our world," Anderson remarks. "So we had some different challenges: we had skin texture we had to work out, we had to grow hair off of characters' heads and we had to find an animation style that was still fun and loose and had some caricature to it, but could portray humans in a believable way. The Incredibles was a definite inspiration for this. It was eye-popping to me, and certainly part of my education in 3D and how to do character animation with all of its subtleties. We looked at a lot of Warner Bros. cartoons for our inspiration as well. Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella and Peter Pan were Disney inspirations as far as combining believable characters with much more caricatured ones in the same scenes. In defining the two time periods, we define the present as Disney animation from the `50s, where it's caricatured but very grounded, believable, dimensional animation. In the future, things move a little bit faster and are quirkier and more off beat, with characters that can zip around like Warner Bros. cartoons, and where characters from the present day follow all the rules of The Illusion of Life.

"One really interesting technique that we used is occlusion. It creates shadows based on the proximity of one object to another. It's a way to avoid that glowy feel that computer animation has or the way mouths look like they're illuminated from inside. Occlusion, because it's a closed space in there, will darken that mouth immediately. Then when we add our texture and lighting on top of that, you have a bit more real look to the images you're creating. It's that extra layer of believability that computer animation is so great at…

"For me, personally, there was an overall shift in how I picture things in my head, `cause I picture them in 2D. It took a while because I'm so used to how you create the impression of space in 2D: texture or fabric or hair. In 3D, it's still an impression, it's still an illusion, but it's that much greater. What is the texture of a certain character or a certain building material? I never would think of those things. That really opened up a whole new world for me. So I went from impressionistic thinking to realistic thinking. Because our movie got off and running so quickly, it was a matter of me getting thrown into it and watching what everyone was doing. They would ask me questions like: `What do you want the hair to feel like?' Do you want it to be coarse, soft, matted hair? My education was leaning on people around me and relying on them. "

According to overall animation supervisor Michael Belzer, they looked at what they had at Disney and tried to piggyback on the success of Chicken Little. "I met with Chicken Little supervisor Eamonn Butler beforehand and capitalized off of their gain. The rig was based on Chicken Little, but departed somewhat with an automated rig setup that allowed them to churn out a number of rigs that the rigging department wouldn't have to build from scratch. These base set templates allowed certain blend shapes to be spread across a similar topology on different types of rig structures. For instance, characters with large chins like Bowler Hat Guy [or Uncle Art]."