Hi, I'm Jim Capobianco.
I wrote and directed Your Friend the Rat.
And I'm Nate Wragg.
I'm the production designer of Your Friend the Rat.
CAPOBIANCO: So the idea of the film came while I was working on the feature,
way back in 2000.
'Cause we always do all this tons of research on our films,
and I thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be neat
"to actually use some of this in the short?"
You know, a lot of people at Pixar have come from 2D,
myself included, and love the form.
And it was a great opportunity for a lot of animators to do 2D again.
And so many people just embraced it.
And, unfortunately, we couldn't utilize all the animators at Pixar who do 2D,
or even wanted to try it,
but we were able to get a good group together to handle it,
and they all just had a blast,
and I had a blast working with them to do this.
And some of them had never even animated in this style of 2D before.
The look of it came out of the old Disney '50s educational films
that were done by Ward Kimball and others at the studio,
and one of the driving forces behind it to emulate those films a little bit.
But it was really economical to do,
and I thought that would be neat to do the short in that style.
I think we were really trying to find our own voice within that,
using that as a jumping-off point.
(WRAGG LAUGHS)
CAPOBIANCO: And, actually, the thing I found working on this
was how do you make these sort of dry...
Some of these facts can be kind of dry,
how do you make them entertaining and fun?
And one of the challenges of putting the film together
was trying to think of what is a funny way
to get this information across,
and in a succinct amount of time as well.
But always add that little flourish to it,
'cause that's actually what was wonderful about the Ward Kimball stuff,
is that no matter how limited it was, or stylized,
he would always add this little touch of full animation on ones,
little flourish and it would just bring that much life to it.
WRAGG: Yeah, in a lot of ways, the animation...
You're spending just as much time on it.
You're just pinpointing what areas you want to animate.
And I think probably the best example of it in the cartoon is
in this section, right here, with the Black Death.
We have just a simple drawing of Linguini, looking kind of funny,
he falls over, and just his legs do this crazy little bit of animation.
But just having those legs be in there and doing that fun little bit of animation
really sells the whole idea that he's dead,
(BOTH LAUGHING)
but his legs are still kicking around a little bit.
CAPOBIANCO: That little final bug kick.
WRAGG: That's one thing that was kind of exciting about this short,
was all the history and everything that goes into this cartoon
is handled in a really funny way, and isn't really taken that serious.
CAPOBIANCO: You're really trying to find,
"What's the caricature of the moment?
"What's the gag you're trying to get across,
"and how do you caricature it the best way?"
Awesome styling of the Chinese zodiac
by Teddy Newton, Nate and Scott Morse.
WRAGG: One thing that was exciting, for me, coming onto this project,
was with all the...
The short is basically broken down into three sections,
and the first section is the history section,
and Jim really wanted to capture each time period
in the shot that we had.
So, for example, if we have a shot that dates back into the Roman era,
or in the black plague era,
I was asked to start referencing artwork,
and basically the way people created art back in those times,
and try and style it up a little bit.
So that it had a neat, sort of, funny flair to it,
but it also felt true to how they designed stuff back then.
CAPOBIANCO: Right, like the Revolution section,
we wanted to get a real woodblock look for it,
and even the way the animation was styled
was to have a very staccato kind of feel to it.
And, actually, if you went frame by frame,
through that section where the rat hits the other rat,
you'd see this one gigantic hand.
WRAGG: Yeah, that's one thing that's really exciting about the 2D animation.
There's different ways that you do it.
You would handle it differently than in CG.
You know, CG, everything is kind of spelled out for you
in the way you have to do it with the computer programs,
but in 2D, it's really more artistically free.
CAPOBIANCO: The stop-motion shot,
I just went, "What if we did that globe shot in stop-motion?"
And then it just felt like it would fit
the sort of educational aspect of the film.
One of the things about stop-motion, though,
is it's just... You have one shot at it,
unlike everything else.
WRAGG: Well, just like they used to. (LAUGHS)
The video game section that we had, we could have tried to draw something
that felt like Canada,
but, instead, Jim had this great idea that it would be a video game,
so we handled it like an 8-bit video game,
and it still felt like Canada,
but it was really cheesy and silly at the same time.
CAPOBIANCO: I want to talk about the music a little bit.
The music incorporates really well.
One of the things I wanted to do, like in the old '50s animation,
was to have the music written early enough
that we could actually animate to it,
and it could actually inspire us and be really integrated within the story,
and so having Alex Mandel do that, it really, I think, accomplished that.
This is wonderful collage art from Teddy Newton for this section.
Just bits and pieces from everywhere. I don't know where he gets it all.
Different magazines and photographs and stuff,
and he just puts it all together.
WRAGG: Yeah, it sort of makes you really believe each one of the materials
that Emile's chewing through.
It definitely feels like there's a door, there's a pipe,
there's some cinder blocks.
CAPOBIANCO: And people should just step through this animation,
this 2D animation,
it's just some really funny drawings within this.
And you don't really see it going by, you just feel it,
but the guys did such an amazing job.
I think with this style of 2D, too, you get this...
It's really based on the design.
The look of it is what speaks more than, say, the acting,
or you're not really trying to incorporate the illusion of life.
(WRAGG CHUCKLES)
WRAGG: I think this shot coming up here, right after the atomic explosion,
was one of the first bits of animation,
and I think Bob Scott did it, and it really set the tone...
CAPOBIANCO: It did, yeah.
WRAGG: ...for how everything was going to be animated.
CAPOBIANCO: Actually, he did both of these, one after the other, didn't he?
WRAGG: Yeah, I think he did them both in, like, a week,
and I remember we showed it at dailies,
and everyone was just like, "Oh! I get it!"
CAPOBIANCO: Yeah, one of the difficulties we had with the animators
was trying to get them to not do so much animation.
To pull them back and to do a little less with this stylized way.
WRAGG: I couldn't even believe how fast they animated a lot of this stuff.
- I know, it went really quickly. - WRAGG: They just were, like...
CAPOBIANCO: We just passed our very scientific-looking illustrations there.
They're not labeled, I thought I should tell everybody,
it's Louis Pasteur, Gertrude Elion and Jonas Salk.
The three scientists there.
And here we come. This is the one shot in the whole film
that's integrated all our styles of animation.
We have after effects, we have 2D, stop-motion,
all within the same... And computer, CG, all in the same shot.
This was all done by Nate Wragg.
He cleaned up the animation that was done in 2D,
and we projected it on a chalkboard.
WRAGG: Yeah, that was really cool
because Sarah animated everything by hand,
and then we, frame by frame, projected it onto a large chalkboard,
and I spent the day tracing it, drawing by drawing, with chalk.
And it goes by really quick.
It's probably about six seconds, but it took about six hours, I think.
CAPOBIANCO: The song came out of...
When I was developing this, I was like, "Well, it's an educational film,"
I want it to have a song in it.
Kind of like Schoolhouse Rock.
That was done in the '70s, that we grew up on.
My good friend, James Dashe, I asked him...
James is a Mac administrator here at Pixar, but a piano composer,
and I said, "Hey, let's do a song. I don't know if they'll go for it,
"but let's just try it." And we sat down and both wrote this song,
and we wanted it to have a rough feel,
and neither of us having written an actual song before,
it sort of has that.
And also Patton and Pete, not really being professional singers,
it also has that feel of two guys coming together to sing a song.
And it kind of all came together.
It was one of those Hail Mary shots
where I was like, "I don't know if this is going to work, (CHUCKLES)
"but let's just try it. Let's just go for it." And it did.
Um... The ending,
I love this sort of integration of CG and the 2D playing.
It kind of pulls together the two ideas we're playing with a lot in the film,
with the three-dimensional and two-dimensional.
And then the idea to play with text, that graphic, everything,
and it's just something I don't think we've ever done here at the studio,
where we've integrated this way and kind of went with this very broad humor,
the Tex Avery kind of style of cartooning.
So, well, that's the end, and I hope everybody enjoyed the commentary.
And it was a joy to make this short,
and I had so much fun working with all these people you see right here,
and the truly talented group, and I hope to work with all of them again someday.
Especially this guy sitting next to me.
WRAGG: Yeah, I mean, hopefully we'll get to do this again.
It was a blast for me.
A great opportunity to just really get to explore all the fun ideas
in the cartoon and try and put some art to them.
CAPOBIANCO: All right, thank you.