If you were feeling sad right now and you recall a sad - or, a very happy memory from the past, it will be tinged with more sadness based on your current feeling. So we felt like that was actually on solid scientific ground .

You have to think about good storytelling and characters first. Then hopefully, the rest of that stuff will follow, some more than others. But if you don't have a good film and strong characters, then you don't have anything down the road.

I knew that there was an upcoming screening where not only were we going to show it to everybody else at the studio, we also needed to move into production... And yet I was sitting there in editorial going this is not working. I'm a failure.

They're expecting us to make mistakes, and they've set up a process that allows us to correct for that and do it again and iterate. So I think that's a real key to the films that we've made.

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

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.

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.