While other Disney/Pixar animated shorts have gone through a tortuous system of rewrites and rethinks, director Enrico Casarosa's vision for his CGI-animated short La Luna - joining the feature film Brave in theatres on June 22, 2012 - was so powerful that his original concept was delivered to the screen relatively intact.
A fable that owes more to Antoine de St. Exupéry's The Little Prince and Hayao Miyazaki's movies than anything Pixar has previously produced, it tells the touching story of a boy's coming of age with sweet simplicity and zero "pain gags."
In Part #1 of our exclusive interview, Casarosa discussed how the short came together. Here, he shares the secrets of Pixar's Brain Trust, and how he created the short's unusual dialogue.
S101: Let’s talk a bit about the working situation at Pixar. I hear a lot about the Brain Trust, the senior animators who critique each film. Who is on this Brain Trust, and what does each person bring to the table? For instance, I’ve heard other directors describe John Lasseter as the Logic Police . . .
Enrico Casarosa: “I’ll preface this by saying that the shorts don’t really get the full attention of the Brain Trust; it’s more informal. So you try to get whoever you can: ‘Hey, do you have a half-hour free?’
“Also, the Brain Trust changes depending on who’s available and who’s not, but the amazing thing is the diversity. I don’t know if you can apply specific adjectives to certain directors but each one comes from different angles. For instance, Pete Docter has a great sense of whimsy and the strange; I really worked well with him on Up. Bob Peterson is a master of comedy; I’m working with him on the dinosaur movie that’s coming out in 2013. He’s a great writer and a funny, funny guy.
“John Lasseter knows what will trigger people, what an audience wants to see. Andrew Stanton is amazing at story structure, he has great ideas. Most of these guys come at something from different angles and that’s what makes the Brain Trust so amazing: you’re not getting the same notes, you’re getting notes from different angles and it’s up to you to figure out how to approach them.
“It’s an interesting challenge in how to take feedback: what do you use and don’t use and how do you trust your instincts. People are not necessarily offering a solution but pointing out a problem, there’s something that could be better. At first you might disagree with them, ‘That won’t work’ but then you think is there something there that could be better?
“I’ve heard Brad Bird describe it as missile strikes on a map. If you’re seeing a lot of missile strikes in one place, that means something’s gotta change. Those are some of the things that make the Brain Trust so valuable and unique in this business. You get these great, smart people with different sensibilities coming together and giving notes to one another.”
S101: What was behind the decision not to have any real dialogue in La Luna?
Casarosa: “Overall, the Pixar shorts have been less verbal than the features. It was more about me convincing John and the studio to have me use gibberish for the dialogue. We have an extensive gibberish track there; they didn’t believe in it right away mainly because in the first reel, my editor Steve Bloom (Lifted) and I did all the voices.
“We didn’t sell it well because gibberish is hard to do. But I wanted gibberish because it went well with the Italian flavour of the short, and all the gesticulating the characters do. I grew up with Italian animation that’s all about gibberish dialogue and a great deal of gesturing. It’s understood all around the world, but it still has that Italian flavour.
“So I fought for it, and we looked for performers who could embody the characters. We used a great performer from Cirque du Soleil named John Gilkey who does great gibberish. He was an amazing gibberish encyclopedia! (everyone laughs).
(producer Kevin Reher enters the room)
“We originally used John Gilkey in Ratatouille for live-action reference of Linguini cooking. Unfortunately, he didn’t sound like our big dad or grandpa. We tried Bob Peterson for the grandpa; he does great voices but he sounded like a young guy trying to act older. Ultimately, we found a 70-year-old storyteller from Marin County named Phil Sheridan to play the nonno. Tony Fucile, a former Pixar animator who illustrates his own books, played the dad. He’s a big dad kind of guy, so he really fit right.
Kevin Reher: “Tell him about the teeth!”
Casarosa: “When Phil Sheridan came in to do the grandpa’s voice, he asked, ‘Do you want this with my teeth or (mimes removing a set of false teeth) without my teeth?’ (everyone laughs) We were half-scared and half-excited; everything in the film is him speaking without his teeth!”
S101: What would you like audiences to take from La Luna that’s not immediately apparent?
Casarosa: “I always had a clear idea of what I wanted the kids to get out of it: trust your instincts. For the parents I wish that, for 5 minutes and 51 seconds, they feel like a kid again. I want to put a smile on their faces and have them feel that nostalgia for what they felt as kids.”
(In Part #3, La Luna producer Kevin Reher discusses the film, and the role of producer in animation.)
Dominic von Riedemann - Dominic is the Animated Film Feature Writer, and winner of 11 Suite 101 Editors' Choice Awards.
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