I think that's pretty crucial for it to succeed and be something more than just something you put your kid in front of and turn on the DVD. We wouldn't have got involved if it were just for little kids. We wanted to write something that works on both levels.

You have to have all these elements of a feature but with a third of the length. And also the development process - there are so many more steps in getting notes from the studio, getting notes from the network.

As an actor going into screenwriting, I was able to understand what type of dialogue feels natural. A lot of the time, as an actor, you don't have the freedom to change what your lines are, and they can often be very unnatural or difficult to portray in a real light.

I think that's pretty crucial for it to succeed and be something more than just something you put your kid in front of and turn on the DVD. We wouldn't have got involved if it were just for little kids. We wanted to write something that works on both levels.

Another thing that makes the process different is we go in there and are completely immersed in [that] world for however many weeks and then we would leave and they would be animating for however many weeks and we wouldn't have anything to do with it. Then we would come back and see all this work that they had done. So it just took a lot more time than it would on anything else.

I would visit Vegas every year when I was a kid. Vegas, to a kid, is a playground, as much as it is to adults. I discovered the magic store in a hotel and would spend hours and hours in there.

We always for better or worse try to put on paper what's going up on screen - whether we're directing it or not. It's really just an extension of that habit which is trying to tell the reader what the movie will look like. Ultimately that is the job of a screenwriter to a certain extent.