Quotes by Pete Docter

About Pete Docter:

Peter Hans is an American film director, animator, screenwriter, producer and voice actor from Bloomington, Minnesota. He is best known for directing the animated feature films Monsters, Inc. (2001), Up (2009) and Inside Out (2015) and as a key figure and collaborator in Pixar Animation Studios. The A. V. Club has called him "almost universally successful". He has been nominated for six Oscars (one win thus far for Up – Best Animated Feature), three Annie Awards (winning two), a BAFTA Children's Film Award (which he won), and a Hochi Film Award (which he won). He has described himself as a "geeky kid from Minnesota who likes to draw cartoons."
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

When I was in middle school, I liked to make cartoons.

Pete Docter

I made tons of films. I did animation for my friends' films. I animated scenes just for the fun of it. Most of my stuff was bad, but I had fun, and I tried everything I knew to get better.

Pete Docter

It's weird - on almost every film I've worked on, the first sequence we storyboard ends up being the first sequence that goes into animation, and ends up being almost shot-for-shot the same.

Pete Docter

When people go to the theater, they don't want to think 'I know exactly what I'm gonna get,' and then they get it and then they walk out. I think you want to walk in going 'I don't really know what this is about,' and have the fun of discovering it.

Pete Docter

'Monsters,' everybody has the thought of monsters in your closet as a kid, and more importantly, the idea of becoming a parent. We're always kind of looking for those emotional nuggets. They're always at the heart of the story.

Pete Docter

Each one of the films get built up and strengthened and reinforced, and we're not afraid to rip stuff out and redo it until we feel it's worthy of the 'Pixar' name.

Pete Docter

'In-between' is sort of - an animator does the key poses. He'll do extremes, you know, like a character reaching out for a glass of water and then another one of him drinking. And the in-betweener has to do all the drawings that goes between those tw...

Pete Docter

I wanted to make sure that 'Up' wasn't a 3D movie about a man who sails his house to South America. It's a movie about an old man who sails his house to South America that also happens to be in 3D. So the first thing is always the story.

Pete Docter

I think, in Japan, animation isn't relegated to being a genre unto itself. It's just a medium by which you can tell any number of stories, be it horror or action or adventure or drama or whatever, and we're trying to do that as well. Every film that ...

Pete Docter

Walt Disney wasn't making films for kids. Neither were the Muppets. A lot of the great, really cool films, they weren't making them for kids.

Pete Docter

'Toy Story' we found, sorta by accident, because we didn't know what we were doing, the idea of being replaced by somebody. Everybody has that fear, or encounters this jealousy at some point.

Pete Docter

I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there's something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it's flee...

Pete Docter

I like doing everything. That's why I came to Pixar, as opposed to Disney or any other studio - it's small. At the time I started, I was, like, the 10th person in the animation group, and we all had to do everything. That's the way I like it, keeping...

Pete Docter

I loved 'Dumbo.' I watched Bugs Bunny time and again. The Muppets were big, too. All of those, they have this real, not darkness but poignancy, that's what makes it stick with you.

Pete Docter

In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It's like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he'll use, like, three lines, and he'll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks ...

Pete Docter

In a regular theatre, you'd be kind of moving your eye from one character 5 feet over to the right on the cut. In IMAX, suddenly that's like 20 feet. So I would love to do something. I think I would really want to take the massive screen into conside...

Pete Docter

I love to go to the airports and just put on, like, dark glasses, so nobody can tell I'm staring at them, and just draw people.

Pete Docter

The way we work at Pixar is we write the script, but then we quickly move on into story reel, which is basically like a comic-book version of the film. And then we do our own dialogue and music and sound effects, all in an effort to be able to basica...

Pete Docter

Work hard! In the end, passion and hard work beats out natural talent.

Pete Docter

Author Bio

  • NamePete Docter
  • DescriptionAmerican animator and film director
  • BornOctober 9, 1968
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionFilm Director; Screenwriter; Animator
  • AwardsAnnie Award