No matter what happens with technology or whether you're in traditional animation or stop-motion or CG, the biggest challenge always is story. The flow of making the movie is usually determined by how your story is coming together, and when your story is straining and you can't quite get your hands around it, your entire production is straining.

When you listen to the music in this film [Despicable Me], it's working on the level of melody, but the other key element is lyrics. There are a number of songs in the film where the lyrics themselves are very much speaking to the essence of what Ted Geisel was setting out to do.

I've carried on, in that same tradition, with my kids. Aside from just his brilliance, in my estimation, I think he had one of the great imaginations of the 20th century. One of the reasons why the tradition carries on, all these years later, is because, as a parent, those are the books that you go to and pull off the shelf because they never stop delighting you.

You have to start with the notion that you pick the actor who's going to embody the role, the best person that you can find. If you don't start with that then it sort of defies the whole purpose of trying to make the best film that you can make.

Why did Ted Geisel end up writing and illustrating for young minds? He has specific imagery in the book, and we never would have moved beyond the discussion phase, if we couldn't have found an expression for The Lorax, dimensionally, that was true to the soul of what comes through in his simple line drawings, on the page.

Anytime you adapt work of somebody who you respect, as much as I respect him, it's an enormous responsibility. In honoring that responsibility, what we try to do is to continually use his work, and the writing that he did about his life and his work, as our guide. That starts with his intent for what he was trying to express when he wrote it, and it extends to his intent overall.

It is incredibly daunting to take on a live-action story. I think that it adds a level of complexity to the responsibility that goes beyond what I've experienced on these two films (The Lorax and Horton Hears a Who).