From shorts to features hailing fro all over the world, 2015 was yet another banner year in the world of animation. To help dive deeper in the process behind some of the best offerings, we have a one-hour THR roundtable featuring Pete Docter (Inside Out), Charlie Kaufman (Anomalisa), Richard Starzak (Shaun the Sheep Movie), Steve Martino (The Peanuts Movie), Roger Allers (The Prophet), and Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur).
In the chat, they discuss the painstakingly detailed process behind each of their films, with Starzak noting his process. “I blindly said I wanted to make a modern-day silent movie [with Shaun the Sheep],” he says. “And even my producers said, ‘I think that’s crazy. I don’t think it’s going to work.’ And to be honest, I didn’t think it was going to work either. I didn’t fully believe it was going to work. That was the sort of fear that I like. You need to put yourself out there a little bit. You need to push yourself. And I quite like that fear of ‘Is this going to work?’
“We submitted it. They said ‘R,'” Kaufman says, regarding the MPAA rating for his feature. “We said ‘Thank you.’ We weren’t sure when we went in. I don’t know the rules — and I understand that I shouldn’t say this — but they’re not always hard and fast. You don’t really know what you’re going to get. We have a lot of cursing in the movie and we have sex and so on. We could have made it more graphic than we did.”
Aside from missing Don Hertzfeldt, it’s a pretty great chat, and can be watched in full below.
What was your favorite animated film this year?