The Head of Story is defined differently for each film. But I found that the role for me was to support the director's vision, and to be a conduit to the story team - and managing that team to realize the vision.

It was so complex [in "Trolls"] that the technical team had to build a new program. It was about rendering and manipulating that weird hair. We also wanted to break the mold of what what we thought the princess was about...we wanted to keep her troll 'look' - the stumpy legs, an ugly/cute look, it was all inspired from the doll.

Sometimes actors come in, you record them, and they do their role.

I was trying to foster a great working relationship between those two departments [design and the writing teams], because classically in animation the two don't get along.

The world is in such a place of social unrest and there's so much violence.

Mike [Mitchell] brought me on as co-director, and eventually we ended up sharing a brain. It was overwhelming initially when I was working with departments I hadn't had contact with before.

I've always loved that film ['The Three Caballeros'], and we were looking for a way to apply it to our own work, and 'Trolls' was it - psychedelic, musical and kinetic insanity.