When I was in middle school, I liked to make cartoons.

It might have been introduced slowly over the course of the years as you recall this memory over and over. So that was a very cool but complex idea that we thought about representing in the film but could not find a way to make it work.

I mean, I've - these other films were flukes. I don't know what I'm doing. I should just quit. What would I miss? I'd miss my house and I'd miss going to work. But I think the thing that I realized I would miss most is probably similar to everybody, which is your friends.

But the truth is, at some point, our films - almost every single one of them - are really bad. And it's largely hats off to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull who have set up a system whereby they're expecting it.

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

Yeah, we were looking for a way to represent adulthood and the passing into adulthood. And I think, for me personally and a lot of the folks that I work with, childhood is kind of a sacred, special kind of point in time that has a real joy and purity to it. And we sort of long on a daily basis to reach back and kind of grab onto that in some way.

People are funny -- they are able to project personality onto anything. I remember as a kid I spent a $ 5 bill once and felt so bad because the other $ 5 bill was now going to be lonely without all the other bills I had in my wallet, you just invest these dead things with life and that is our tendency as people. So animation takes advantage of that, grabs on to it, and runs with it.