After several years of waiting, Inside Out 2 arrives in cinemas in Spain this 19th of June to follow the story of a more adult Riley and her new emotions such as Anxiety, Envy, Ennui (Boredom) and Shame that join the already known Joy, Disgust, Sadness, Anger and Fear.
But why has it taken so many years to make the sequel to a resounding success like it was? Inside Out in 2015? Many people don’t think about what an animator’s hard work is like and how long it takes to make an hour and a half movie. Although you may think that thanks to new technology that time may be less, it is far from reality.
In an interview with SensaCine, the Spanish Pixar animator Jordi Oñate He has explained to us what it is like to work in what many consider the factory of dreams and how long it can take to animate a scene in question:
How many years have you been working at Pixar?
I arrived here in 2011, so I’ve been here for 12 years, almost 13, and I’ve worked on all the Pixar films since then. The only one I couldn’t work on is Lightyear because I was working on Elementary and I was there longer.
How many minutes do you think you have done in total in all these years?
We have an application here on my computer that tells you exactly the minutes, because everything is now computerized. But I don’t know exactly. Let’s see, between these 12 years I do about 2 minutes each year on stage. That is to say…about 25, 25 minutes each year. Normally we make about 2 minutes for each film. So there are 3 or 4 seconds that we can do per week, because we have to make 24 drawings with the computer to create one second of animation.
Is it harder to animate humans or emotions?
When I came here to Pixar I focused on animating humans and since humans you have to make them more natural to animate them and in theory they are more difficult. Because people are going to see the humans and they’re going to know if there’s bad animation or not and then they lose that connection to the movie.
Pixar Inside Out 2
And I had that training behind me and they put me to do emotions that move faster, more like cartoons, and I had to learn again to be able to do that type of animation as more extravagant.
I know your favorite part of cheering Inside Out 2 It has been Anxiety, but it is the fastest in movements as well, so it has been the most difficult, right?
Of course, because I believe that as an animator I am always looking for a new challenge and there comes a time when you learn humans or you learn to make dogs or whatever, in the end there comes a time when you have been doing the same thing for maybe three or four years and now you want to change and it has happened to me with the emotions that I wanted to explore that world. And with Ansiedad, what I liked about it is the acting behind it. How to convey to the audience that this character is anxiety, because we have other emotions, like fear, for example, which can look like anxiety because we are both stressed.
So if you really make two or three minutes per film and it takes you nine or ten months to finish them, has a director ever told you that they didn’t like what you animated and said goodbye to all those months of work?
Sometimes it happens that during the movie, the writers are constantly looking to see if what they have is the best product, right? So, they have a first sketch, and they make iterations of 6 sketches and there comes a time when they have 6-7 sketches that they say ‘okay, we’re not going to touch it anymore, you can animate now’. But sometimes they say ‘oh wait, I’m going to watch this one’ and maybe it’s the scene that happened to you and they eliminate it from the movie and sometimes that has happened to us and when that happens to us, only one has happened to me Maybe I think, when you are walking through the hallways the animators are going to give you a lot of hugs because they know how hard it is, but yes, sometimes it happens.
What movie did you go with out of curiosity?
With Lucas. One of my best work experiences, because the director was Italian and since we had the same culture, the vibe, we had a feeling. But one of the sequences was taken from me
Do you have any advice for people who want to work as an animator?
Honestly, keep going if you love what you’re doing. Let them continue practicing, let them get together with people from around the world, even if they are people who have just started or with teachers, and who are constantly teaching the work they are doing to these people, because the best thing they can do is receive feedback, receive criticism from these people who are teachers and know more than them or people who are just starting out and are excited.
I went to Pixar’s dream factory to see the best 30 minutes of an animated film
So, the best thing you can do is continue practicing every day and above all get involved in that world on the internet or in schools. And not worry about the future, because the future is going to arrive at some point, so they have to take advantage of what they are doing now and all that knowledge that they are going to have is going to be a mountain, a pillar to be able to work at Pixar or maybe in some London film that also has a large group of companies there. I would say that, focus on the art and enjoying how to animate.
