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Up and Away

Martha Pickerill

Director Pete Docter told TFK all about the new Pixar film, Up. It will be in theaters on May 29.

Can grouchy old Carl escape his lonely life by attaching 10,000 helium balloons to his house and floating away forever? Pete Docter of Pixar Animation Studios explores this fantasy in Up.

"As a kid, I always thought of getting balloons and seeing how many it would take to lift me up," Docter told TFK. He also directed Monsters, Inc. and wrote stories for many Pixar films.

Tricks of the Trade

Pixar films are computer animated. The art and science of computer animation are constantly changing. Every time a new film is made, the digital bag of tricks has a new tool in it. Docter says that making the balloons look believable was the biggest challenge.

"We had to figure out what would happen as the balloons bumped into each other," Docter says. "We had a computer program to make those movements happen," so that each one didn't have to be drawn individually.

The team had fun researching the film. They rode in a hot-air balloon. They visited South America, where Carl goes, to be sure the landscape was drawn accurately. "That was amazing," Docter says.

A Lifelong 'Toon Fan

Docter's parents are musicians. The family went to a lot of concerts. Young Pete would draw wacky cartoons on his concert program. "I'd draw all over it. What if a football landed in the tuba? Or all the violin strings popped?" says Docter. In college, he studied cartoon drawing, not fine art. After becoming a pro cartoonist, he tried creating art on computers, and found a whole new way to tell a story.

What advice does he have for kids who want to make animated films? "Draw, draw, draw!"

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