Pete Docter, Pixar‘s Chief Creative Officer, explains what the animation studio expects from their sequels.
With a sequel to The Incredibles and Toy Story and a spinoff series for Inside Out in the works, the filmmaker opened up about what they want from these follow-up films.
“It’s a combo, because of course, we’re making these for the audience, not for ourselves, so you want to know if they’ll be well-received,” Docter said in an interview with Fandango. “Then, we do have a sort of guideline or guardrail that if we get a certain way in it’s not feeling like it’s about something new and substantive, then we’ll cut bait. So, it’s imperative that something feels like, ‘Oh, this is furthering the story!’”
Docter continued, “I was talking about something that we didn’t explore in the first one. Or, something deeper that we didn’t explore about the human condition or our own experiences in life.”
Although the studio has done sequels, Docter recently said they were not going to do live-action versions of their films.
“No, and this might bite me in the butt for saying it, but it sort of bothers me,” he told Time. “I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves. To remake it, it’s not very interesting to me personally.”
Docter said that making a live-action film about a rat “would be tough” and added, “So much of what we create only works because of the rules of the [animated] world.”
“So if you have a human walk into a house that floats, your mind goes, ‘Wait a second. Hold on. Houses are super heavy. How are balloons lifting the house?’” he continued. “But if you have a cartoon guy and he stands there in the house, you go, ‘Okay, I’ll buy it.’ The worlds that we’ve built just don’t translate very easily.”
