There's a doctor in the house

When you think about Pixar, you tend to imagine something like Santa’s workshop. The hours are, admittedly, probably on the long side, but somewhere between the carefully constructed screenplay and the most technologically advanced visuals on the planet, some indefinable pixie dust gets thrown onto shiny new items like Wall-E and Ratatouille as they roll off the conveyer belt. How else could you explain the imprint’s extraordinary product and success rate?

In the middle of this thriving cooperative, what actually makes a Pixar director a director? The collaborative nature of computer generated animation does not fit with any notions we have about auteurship. Are they, like, the ones holding the magic powder?
“Sort of,” nods filmmaker Pete Docter. “There’s no doubt about it. It’s a very collaborative medium. At Pixar, the director is the one who comes up with the idea or finds the idea then shepherds it along through different writers and animators. So when I’m directing I’m really the only guy who has the whole movie in his head. That said, when you’re working with the kind of very talented people you have around Pixar you don’t want to tell them too precisely what’s in my head. You need to allow them space to contribute themselves. I feel that if I can communicate what is emotionally necessary, and that the actor or animator can feel it, the rest will take care of itself. That way you get all this great stuff from other people and end up taking the credit.”
Pete Docter ought to know the delineation of duties around the hip San Francisco offices by now. Mr. Docter, Buzz Lightyear’s creative alter-ego and the co-writer of Toy Story, joined the company right out of school and is currently making critics and audiences swoon with Up, his remarkable directorial follow-up to Monsters, Inc. Like that earlier film, Up’s winning marriage of commonplace characters and extraordinary fantasy is close to classic Studio Ghibli output in tone and execution.
“Wow,” he says. “I take that as the ultimate compliment. Miyazaki is pretty amazing. I think I’m one of those guys who has always been attracted to other worlds. I grew up loving The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Wizard of Oz, anything where you get to journey away to some place else but where you still find things that you can recognise and latch onto from the everyday.”  
In that spirit, Up finds 78-year old widower named Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) tying thousands of balloons to his lifelong home in order to set sail on an Amazonian adventure. A wilderness scout who inadvertently tags along soon becomes the crusty septuagenarian best bud. It’s not the most obvious material for an all-ages film, a point not lost on several Wall Street analysts before the film’s US release last July.
Doug Creutz of Wall Street firm Cowen and Company, for example, announced that Pixar was on a downward spiral in commercial terms; “The worries keep coming despite Pixar’s track record, because each film it delivers seems to be less commercial than the last,” he said. Industry watcher Richard Greenfield of Pali Research agreed and advised clients to sell Disney shares, saying: “We doubt younger boys will be that excited by the main character.” Indeed, Thinkway Toys, whose range of products related to Pixar’s 2006 film Cars take billions in merchandise receipts, did not create a single toy based on the new movie.
Happily, none of this speculation was allowed to touch Mr, Docter and his colleagues.
“Honestly, we don’t care about lunchboxes at Pixar,” he says. “Mostly, I think about character and motivation. I’ve read a lot of books on acting and taking acting lessons. If you can give some clear sense of what a character is doing and thinking at any given moment, it dictates the script, the costume design, that sense of wonder, everything. It makes or breaks the film. And if the film isn’t good, it’s not going to make money anyway so thinking about Wall Street is totally counterproductive. Tick the boxes and you’re going to fail on every level.”
As if to prove the old Hollywood maxim that ‘Nobody Knows Anything’, Up has gone on to become the second biggest grossing film of 2009, even before it has been released in most territories. The response has been tremendous. Producer Jonas Rivera tells me about a letter Mr. Docter received from a widowed pensioner who claimed the film gave him hope and a new sense of joie de vivre.
“I was just working from that one picture in my head of a house floating off with helium balloons attached,” says Mr. Docter. “From there we went off and looked at some Herzog movies and tried to make the dialogue as authentic and meaningful as possible. Around the office, they think of me as the schmaltz guy. So I guess I’m always just trying to make the schmaltz feel real.”

Up is released October 9