Hi, my name is Pete Sohn, and I'm the director of Partly Cloudy.
And this is the first thing I directed here at Pixar.
Partly Cloudy started off as an idea that I had as a young boy
when my mom took me to the movies.
My mother, she's Korean,
so movie experiences with her was very interesting
because she didn't speak or understand English very well.
And because we were living here in America,
every movie that we saw was in English.
Most of the time, she didn't understand what the people were saying,
or she didn't really get the gist of some of the scenes in these movies.
She would ask me in Korean, "What were they saying?"
And I'd explain and do my best to translate,
but my Korean wasn't very good,
and so there would always be these kind of little wonky miscommunications
of, "This is what that character said in the movie,"
and she would just shrug her shoulders and kind of move on to the next thing.
But there were movies that we did see that made a huge impact on me
because she could understand these movies
without having to speak or understand English very well.
One of those movies was Dumbo.
I remember my mom taking me to see Dumbo,
and I remember in the opening scene of that movie,
there were storks delivering all these baby animals to this circus train.
As a kid, I wondered, "Where did these birds get these babies from?"
And that was kind of the seed. It all started from there.
I had that idea and I'd forgot about it,
and then years, years later, working at Pixar,
I had an opportunity to pitch some short ideas,
and one of them was that seed.
Where do storks get their babies from, and what is that world?
Maybe it was like a postal service.
And, know what? What if the clouds made the babies?
They could use their lightning powers
and sculpt the cotton-like quality of the clouds that they're sitting on.
That was kind of the inception of the short film
and is pretty much what I had pitched
to John Lasseter and the other directors here at Pixar.
My first pitch of the story,
they talked about that they loved the concept, they loved the world,
and they loved the beginnings of what these characters could be,
but there was no story yet. And there wasn't.
And so I went back to the drawing table,
and just tried to come up with, "What do I want to say with this story?
"Okay, who are these guys?"
Some of my favorite stories have this personal element to it that is real.
And somewhere in the middle of the story process,
I started thinking about my relationship with my mother.
I talk about watching these movies with my mom,
but the communication barrier that I had with my mother
kind of seeped into this thing.
One of the kind of tenets of making the short was I didn't want any dialogue,
I wanted it to be this kind of silent film
where the characters would respond to each other
without speaking any language.
Thinking about my relationship with my mom,
because she spoke Korean and didn't speak English very well,
and I spoke English but not Korean very well,
that started to click into things of how we would miscommunicate.
I started thinking of this cloud as my mother,
and I am the stork trying to communicate with my mom,
and how to solve these weird miscommunications
that we had all our lives.
What's the answer to that?
I always wanted to do best by her,
but sometimes she thought I was trying to do something negative,
or she misunderstood something and explode her top,
and I would have to reel back and like, "Look, look, no, no,
"that's not what I meant to say or what I meant to do.
"I'm sorry you took that wrong."
And that kind of fit really well with what the story was turning out
'cause once I set up that Gus, the cloud character,
I had other clouds that were making easier and cute animals
that looked fun to be with,
it was that kind of miscommunication that I thought, oh, that I could exploit,
like, "Okay, what if this bird always kept looking over there
"to the fun cloud and Gus would think,
"'Does this bird want to leave me?"'
There are definitely experiences that I've had with my mother
where she would think, "Are you trying to do that?"
And, like, "No, that's not what I'm trying to do,"
but how do I communicate that without saying it in dialogue?
And it was all about this idea that, "You know what?
"I don't speak the same language that you do.
"I love you, I am here for you,
"and how do I best express that to you?"
The ending came from thinking about a gesture.
When I was a kid, my mother used to draw with me all the time.
When we'd fight, we'd fight about language problems
or things that were happening in our lives,
but then I could communicate with her with drawings,
and there was this kind of gesture
that I could make contact with her with art.
This ending in the short
really was about how to communicate a gesture of love.
When Peck, the stork, comes back and reveals
that all he's looking for was this protection,
that's the gesture, that was the gesture of love saying,
"I love you, I'm not going anywhere. I'm gonna always be here for you."
Bob Peterson was a huge help in finding that last gesture,
so thank you, Bob, for the love.
Thanks, John Lasseter, for the guidance.
There's so many people to thank, but just one big, cloudy hug
for everyone that was giving and showing and supporting the short.