Peter Sohn on Partly Cloudy - Interview
Disney/Pixar Animator Discusses Up's Animated Short
Oct 27, 2009
Chatting with Pixar animators, it's clear they have the one of the hardest, yet enjoyable, jobs around. Free to pursue their muses by the studio's cofounder John Lasseter, they're nevertheless pushed to the limits of their abilities to create arguably the finest body of work produced by a CGI animation studio.
Peter Sohn, the young director of the short 'Partly Cloudy,' joined Up story supervisor Ronnie del Carmen to talk about the brutal, yet fulfilling process in making his film.
S101: Moving on to you, Peter, what was your background, how did you get to direct your short ‘Partly Cloudy’?
Peter Sohn: “Before we start on that, I just want to say that everyone at Pixar has a great deal of respect for Ronnie. His heart is like this projector: he gets things in and he projects them through his heart–“
Ronnie del Carmen:(giggles and blushes) “Aww, thanks!”
Sohn: “I came to Pixar in 2002. I was at Warner Bros. and I got an invite to work on The Incredibles but my animation reel was too green for Pixar, but I got into the art department for Finding Nemo. Ever since then, I’ve been moving around from department to department, film to film.”
S101: Where did the idea for ‘Partly Cloudy’ come from?
Sohn: “That was an idea I had as a kid: it was one of those ‘what if, where if, why if’-type things. I had a chance to pitch some shorts, and one of them was this one, I thought it could be a really cool world.”
S101: In the short, you set up this wonderful dialogue between Gus and Peck. What were the characters as you saw them?
Sohn: “It started out like The Honeymooners, where it was this Ralph Kramden/Ed Norton relationship. But then it started turning into my mother and I. It was a cool learning experience, finding these characters and breaking them down into these personal things that I had grown up with.”
S101: How so?
Sohn: “Gus is a fiery kind of artist: he makes things that are kind of difficult, but he loves it. Peck is a loyal bird, but knows it’s a hard relationship, it’s a tough thing to live with, and how do you answer that relationship?”
S101: When I talked with Doug Sweetland about ‘Presto,’ he talked about how much of a change there was from his initial vision to what actually ended up onscreen. Did you have a similar journey?
Sohn: “Oh yeah! I have to say ‘Ditto’ to everything Doug said. What I initially pitched was almost like a commercial, with Gus getting his own baby at the end. I was saying, ‘I can’t let go of this! This has gotta be the ending!’ I held onto it for so long, but understanding what the process is of letting go, and letting your babies go! That was a real challenge.”
S101: What made you let go of that?
Sohn: “It was figuring out, ‘What am I saying with this short?’ It was, ‘how do I answer this relationship’ versus ‘wouldn’t it be cool if there was this gimmicky cloud-baby at the end?’ When I started looking deeper, finding the answers: what is Peck trying to say? He’s trying to say that he loves Gus and he’s not going anywhere, and that meant more to me than his present.”
S101: What were your visual inspirations for ‘Partly Cloudy’?
Sohn: “Dumbo was the first visual inspiration: the whole storks thing and the mother-son relationship. A lot of it was just drawing it out and collaborating with a bunch of people. It started out like Picasso mixed with a toilet paper-commercial mascot, such a cheesy thing. So collaborating with a lot of the technical and art people was really important to getting the look of the short right.”
S101: Who was really important to this process?
Sohn: “There were two guys: Mike Fu and Dave Bett. Finding what a cloud person looked like was a real challenge because clouds are wispy, see-through things. You can’t just put eyeballs and a smile on there because you’d just get pool balls and a weird tongue in this cloud. So we had to thicken them up and really caricature them, and we’d get so technical that there was no feeling to them anymore, so we’d have to push back and make them broader and more cartoony.”
S101: Who else was really important for finding the right track?
Sohn: “The meetings were mostly with JL: John Lasseter. He is completely focused on helping you find your story. It’s like this parent who tells you, ‘I’ve raised kids before, this is what I know about raising children.’ And me as a new parent, saying, ‘No! I know what I’m doing!’ (RdC giggles) But later on, I started to realize, ‘Ah, wise old man. I will listen now.’ Andrew Stanton and Bob Peterson were in the mix as well.”
S101: Who really guided you to that turning point that you talked about before, cloud-baby versus making the relationship work?
Sohn: “Andrew Stanton and Bob Peterson, both of them were asking me, ‘What do you want to say?’ I kept thinking, ‘I’m not trying to say something, I thought this would be a funny kind of thing.’ They were telling me to look deeper, in very different ways.”
(In Part #3 of this interview, Ronnie and Peter delve more into the process of making Up, and how Peter became Russell.)
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