Quotes from Pete Docter

'Monsters,' everybody has the thought of monsters in your closet as a kid, and more importantly, the idea of becoming a parent. We're always kind of looking for those emotional nuggets. They're always at the heart of the story.

With sadness specifically, in America you read about people medicating to avoid sadness. They don't want to experience sadness, and yet it's such a vital part of being human.

We all want happiness in our life. I mean, there are so many books on, like, how to be happy and what you need for happiness, and you want that for your kid, too; you want your kid to be happy.

I don't think it's physically possible for little kids to know what abstract thought is.

And in part that's good but then, like any emotion - and this is something we learned from the research as well - there are positive and negative aspects to all of these.

So this idea of moving seemed like a good way to sort of represent that metaphorically. It also is something for me personally. When I was in fifth grade - so about 11 - my folks moved us to Denmark.

I loved 'Dumbo.' I watched Bugs Bunny time and again. The Muppets were big, too. All of those, they have this real, not darkness but poignancy, that's what makes it stick with you.

I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there's something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it's fleeting, and it's temporal.

I like doing everything. That's why I came to Pixar, as opposed to Disney or any other studio - it's small. At the time I started, I was, like, the 10th person in the animation group, and we all had to do everything. That's the way I like it, keeping it fresh.

At Pixar, of course, we have all these people, and they're just used to our process now where it's a discussion; it's a discovery. It's not individual artists going and fussing off by themselves in isolation and then handing their work in.

Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and, at that same point, it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations.

Toy Story we found, sorta by accident, because we didnt know what we were doing, the idea of being replaced by somebody. Everybody has that fear, or encounters this jealousy at some point.

It's really, always, the story and the characters that come first, and the other things are kind of dealt with in time or, in fact, driven by the story.

I guess different brains work in different ways.

When people go to the theater, they don't want to think 'I know exactly what I'm gonna get,' and then they get it and then they walk out. I think you want to walk in going 'I don't really know what this is about,' and have the fun of discovering it.

I wanted to make sure that 'Up' wasn't a 3D movie about a man who sails his house to South America. It's a movie about an old man who sails his house to South America that also happens to be in 3D. So the first thing is always the story.

In a regular theatre, you'd be kind of moving your eye from one character 5 feet over to the right on the cut. In IMAX, suddenly that's like 20 feet. So I would love to do something. I think I would really want to take the massive screen into consideration so that it would be done properly.

'In-between' is sort of - an animator does the key poses. He'll do extremes, you know, like a character reaching out for a glass of water and then another one of him drinking. And the in-betweener has to do all the drawings that goes between those two. You know it could be 12, 23 whatever in-betweens.

I'm not actually sure if guilt is an emotion.

Work hard! In the end, passion and hard work beats out natural talent.

I made tons of films. I did animation for my friends' films. I animated scenes just for the fun of it. Most of my stuff was bad, but I had fun, and I tried everything I knew to get better.

Each one of the films get built up and strengthened and reinforced, and we're not afraid to rip stuff out and redo it until we feel it's worthy of the 'Pixar' name.

'Toy Story' really felt like just a bunch of guys working in their garage for fun. When it came out and people liked it, it was mind-blowing.

When we did 'Toy Story,' that was an all-hands-on-deck situation that really was time-intensive.