There's something really emotional about not having any sound. That allows, I think, the audience to participate more actively and kind of imagine what are they talking about there?

Parents don't want their children to lose that purity and innocence of childhood. We want to bottle that and hold onto that, but it's impossible.

So this idea of moving seemed like a good way to sort of represent that metaphorically. It also is something for me personally. When I was in fifth grade - so about 11 - my folks moved us to Denmark.

So we can sit with Lee Unkrich and Andrew Stanton, and all the other folks and experience what the film is going to be like. And then we go away into a room, and we talk about what worked and what didn't. And then we take all of those findings and we do that whole process again.

Traditionally, animation has been dominated by men in the past. I don't know why it attracted guys.

The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.

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