An Interview with Pixar Animator Emilie Goulet (Inside Out 2) (original) (raw)
Anger, Joy, Disgust and Anxiety surround Envy_, in Inside Out 2_ (Photo courtesy Disney/Pixar)
Riley (Kensington Tallman) and ‘friends’ Joy (Amy Poehler), Disgust (Liza Lapira), Fear (Tony Hale), Anger (Lewis Black), and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) are back for a new adventure in Inside Out 2 (Kelsey Mann, 2024), a worthy, vibrant follow-up to the original classic of 2015, which continues the time honoured Pixar tradition of imaginative world building combining stylized realism with a child-like sense of splendour, humour, and charm. With Riley hitting puberty, her younger-self emotions are joined by new emotional kids on the block, Anxiety (voiced with appropriate nervous energy by Maya Hawke), Envy (Bears breakout star Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (appropriately voiced by rising French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser). Given our past and present affiliations with Concordia University and its Cinema program, we were excited to learn that Emilie Goulet, an alumni of Concordia University’s Animation department, worked as an animator on Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out 2. Goulet has worked on over 30 other Pixar and Sony Animation Studios films, including Lightyear (2022), Luca (2021), Soul (2020, Onward (2020), Toy Story 4 (2019), Incredibles 2 (2018), and Coco (2017). We jumped at the opportunity to interview Goulet while on her press junket for the June 14 release of Inside Out 2. The interview was conducted via Zoom on June 11, 2024, and has been edited for clarity. The video of the full, unedited interview is available (click above).
Inside Out 2 (Photo courtesy Disney/Pixar)
David Hanley (DH): We'll start with a general question, if it's okay. I looked at the credits for the film, and there's an army of animators. So could you talk a bit about what your specific job is, what you do, at what point in the process [do you fit in], are you post-production, pre-production, in the middle? Who do you work with? Do you have any contact with the writers, the director, the voice actors, or do you work with the animation department only? Do they give you sketches to work from, or do you come up with your own designs?
Emilie Goulet (EG): Okay, so on an animated film, and I guess in every production, the special thing about animation is that we have to create everything, right? So it starts with a very small crew of basically the director and the writer, and then slowly you'll add what we call story artists, which are the storyboard artists, and then concept artists will start drawing the designs of the new characters, the sets, and the colour explorations for tone, etc. And slowly the team will grow with small teams of people in each department, like the character artists, the people that build the puppets, and the animators, the people that do the hair, the simulation artists, and the texture, the light, all that stuff.
I was part of that small crew from the beginning doing pre-production. At Pixar you don't do that every single show, because they do rotations, but it's really cool if you like to do that, and you get the opportunity to participate in that. Some people, it's not necessarily their jam, because it can be a little technical. They prefer to focus on animating shots, or do leadership positions, but I thought that opportunity was really fun and great.
Inside Out 2 (Photo courtesy Disney/Pixar)
Working with other departments, working with character artists, I didn't necessarily build the rig, but I would test it. So on two characters, Disgust and Ennui, I helped building and testing the rig, and making sure that we could get the visuals, the facial expression, and how the body moves to get it to where we wanted it to look in the film. And after that pre-production phase, which for me, it was about six months, but it can go for a little longer, I started animating shots with the team, and then the animation team started, you know, 10 people a month later, 20, 30, and then towards the end of the film, you get the army, because we need to get the movie done.
When it's animation, we don't necessarily interact with the writer, but it's a lot of collaboration with the director himself. The writer and some story artists might attend dailies, or reviews for animation, but it's mostly the animation team with the director and the producer, and then we just talk about the shots.
We make sure that we iterate on the shots, right? We don't necessarily show a shot, and then it's done. There'll be multiple iterations to make sure that we tell the story that the film wants to tell. And the director is [making sure] it's going in the right direction, basically, for the film.
DH: It sounds very creative, because I imagine what some people [do] is just pushing buttons, but to be at the very start, you actually create characters.
This is kind of a related question, because I once saw this documentary about some Disney animators from the 30s and 40s, and they were saying, they watched a film, and they say “I did that dwarf” or “I animated that broomstick.” 1 Do you have that [sort of experience]?
EG: That's what we call casting. You're casting the animators on certain shots or certain characters. Some animators will prefer to focus on certain characters. Others will prefer to focus on certain types of shots, more like comedy or physicality or more dialogue or heavy acting.
I would say that it's good to have a diversity of different kinds of shots and characters. And it’s also they [the producers] can give you a little, we call them chunks, a little segment of a couple of shots. What we can do also is work on one character in a couple of shots, and then say it's a dialogue between two characters or three characters. Another animator might do character B, and another animator might do character A. And that's also a time where collaboration is key, to work really in tandem with the other animator to make sure that we're focusing on the character that we're animating, but we're getting to the point of the story, right?
Donato Totaro (DT): I have another sort of process-related question. I assume that when you studied at Concordia, you did traditional 2D animation. So in terms of the work process and the way your creativity is inputted into the project, do you see any differences in terms of working in 2D and then working in 3D computer animation?
EG: It's really interesting you say that, because when I first graduated, computers were kind of just starting. So, yes, [when] I did my degree, my films were all in traditional animations. And then when it came to learning the computer back then, it was very technical. I feel like you needed an engineer's degree to make the software work. That was my impression from an artist's perspective. But as the years went by, the software became a lot more user-friendly and it was as if I had to return to my artistic roots and really focus on the art and not be bothered with the technology. Because doing a drawing, it's very much about your gut feeling and the gestures of the pencils and feeling, breathing life. And when I started with the computer animation, like that technology back in the early 2000s, it was really hard to get to that.
I felt like in order to get what you wanted, you had to do so many technical steps that you'd get a distance from that. And then as the years go by, the tools became better for us to go back to that, your gut feeling, pouring your soul and your heart into [it]. It's kind of abstract the way I'm describing it, but it's nice to feel that you're really an artist at the end of the day. And the technology is there to support the art and the art is also there to inspire new technologies. I feel there's a lot more collaboration between science [and] art over the years.
Embarrassing throws themselves on the control console, in Inside Out 2 (Photo courtesy of Disney/Pixar.
DT: I was always curious, does Pixar have proprietary animation software they use, or is it an industry standard that is used by all studios?
EG: I think I know of a couple of studios that use proprietary software, but it's pretty rare. Pixar has its own, and it's really good. I think it has to do with the fact that the mentality at Pixar is very much “let's do great films and let's support each other in what we want to do.” I don't know if you've ever read the book Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull, 2 one of the founders of Pixar. I love that book.
He comes from the engineering side. He was part of the people that basically invented 3D animation. And he was always curious about the art and how do you bridge that, I don't want to call it gap, but how do you make communication seamless between the two? Because our brains work differently. And that's very important at Pixar, to make sure that we can work together.
DH: You mentioned going back to your artistic roots. You presumably became interested in animation when you were a teen, and you're making films about teens now. Is there anything that impressed you when you were starting out, art or comics or films or whatever, that you now find coming out in your work today?
EG: Yeah, it's interesting. The first film I saw in theaters was Disney's Fantasia [1941]. And I have a frame of The Cat Came Back [ 1988, Cordell Baker ] at home. I love that movie. To this day.
And also, I grew up in the 80s [with] Saturday morning cartoons and shorts, a lot of animation on the CBC and Radio-Canada. I would see the NFB 3 shorts on TV. And The Cat Came Back is such a classic for me. Those had an influence on me and stayed with me. The timing of the animation and the comedy is just so pure and funny and satisfying and effective and, yeah, timeless. It's 2D, but it still works.
DT: Watching both films [Inside Out and _Inside Out 2_] after each other, as a Montrealer, as a Québécois, I just felt [while] it isn't a Canadian film, it did feel quite Canadian, especially the second. It's all about hockey and [there is] the introduction of the French character, Ennui. Did that cross your mind as well?
Ennui from Inside Out 2 (Photo courtesy Disney/Pixar)
EG: Oh my gosh. Thank you for saying that, because that's why I wanted to work on that character. I felt like I related so much with Ennui. I mean, I was a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Montreal.
DT: Which suburbs?
EG: In Saint-Lambert, on the South Shore. And, you know, I had a great upbringing, but summers are long. And that's actually how creativity started for me. It's like, oh, I'm bored. What am I going to do? I want to make something. There's got to be more to life than this. That's where I started to make my own comics and drawings and tell my own stories. I always drew as a kid, but I feel like as a teenager, that's when it solidified that it would become my way of expressing myself.
DH: Concordia has this reputation of [training students] to make artisan films for the NFB. So how did you make your journey from where you were to where you are today?
EG: Well, I actually started in Montreal working at CINAR and Cinegroup. And then I graduated and September 11th happened. I feel like in the world of funding for the arts, there was a lot of disruption back then. I mean, in the arts, there [are] always waves, right? And right now we're going through another intense period, let's call it that, with the advent of streaming and COVID and all that stuff.
And I think what happened is I always wanted to be a part of the making of a movie. And after working at CINAR, I worked in video games and something was missing. I learned a lot working in video games, but I felt like I wasn't part enough of the storytelling of the games. It's a different kind of narrative also. And I really needed to go back to film.
I made my way into more commercial films, working on contracts. And I realized that I really enjoy working with people as a team. I love being on my own, but to make my . . . Basically, you animate your shots on your own, right? But I like the idea of working with other departments, working with peers, other animators, and working with a director too.
Joy and her Anxiety personified, in nside Out 2 (Photo courtesy Disney/Pixar)
So the more I discovered that, the closer it got me to Pixar, in a way, without me necessarily knowing it. One of my first experiences was at a studio called Real Effects in Texas. And I worked with people that came from Pixar. And their mentality was very much, okay, we're making a film. You people have to talk to each other because we're not just there to tell you what to do. We're making this thing together. I felt like that related to what I learned in Concordia in the sense that you have a voice. You're here because of that. And we wanted to be in the film. Of course, we want to make a cohesive film and a story that holds up. But that part of the collaboration and working together really spoke to me. I feel like I grow more as a human and as an artist with that collaboration. Because sometimes it can go well, and then [sometimes] there's confrontation. It forces you to think and analyze what you want.
But I still draw on my own, and that's very important to me, I feel like the two feed each other. I think I would go crazy if I were on my own alone all the [time], making independent films. Although, even if you're making independent films, you still end up working with people. Your film has to be distributed, you need a producer.
I feel like at some point you find the things that you love, and you just surf the wave. But oh, I like this. And I like to work with these people.
DT: I think the Inside Out series potentially is enormous in terms of where you can take it. The first two films were from this girl's perspective. If you are going to do a third Inside Out, what age would you set it at? Would it be a kid's [boys] point of view? Would it be an old person? Can you imagine an old person's emotions?
EG: Right before you said it, I literally thought it would be really interesting to have someone that is older, much older, and play with flashbacks and things like that. There's a character named Nostalgia in the second movie. There's something there, I think, that could be very interesting in terms of filmmaking too.
DT: It could go on for a very long time, like 52 up [Michael Apted, and to be precise, 42 Up or 56 Up, ed.]! Well, thanks a lot, Emilie. And good luck with everything.
EG: Thank you. My pleasure. Bye.
DH: Thank you.
Notes
- Frank and Ollie (1995, Theodore Thomas) ↩
- Creativity, Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace (Transworld, 2014) ↩
- National Film Board of Canada ↩
David Hanley has a BFA and MA in Film Studies from Concordia University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Canadian Studies at Carleton University, where he has also taught in the Department of Film Studies. As well as being a frequent contributor to Offscreen, he has had pieces published by the University of Toronto Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Synoptique, The Projector, Isis, and Nuacht. He also contributed several entries to the Historical Dictionary of South American Cinema by Dr. Peter H. Rist (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and chapters to the books Reclaiming 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington Books, 2015) and The Spaces and Places of Canadian Popular Culture (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2019). He has been a programmer for Cine Gael of Montreal’s annual series of contemporary Irish films since 2011.
Donato Totaro has been the editor of the online film journal Offscreen since its inception in 1997. Totaro received his PhD in Film & Television from the University of Warwick (UK), is a part-time professor in Film Studies at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and a longstanding member of AQCC (Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma).
Volume 28, Issue 7 / July 2024 Interviews Videos animation disney animation studios montreal filmmaker pixar