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Lasseter continued, "We went to incredible detail. Now that you have it on DVD, you can go see that when you see when McQueen goes down and gets stuck in the cactus, look closely and the prickly pears on the cactus look like cars. You will look and see that the flowers that he’s watering, they’re actually taillights from ‘50s cars. So the level of detail that we’re getting into with this… Of course everybody’s seen the little insects, which are little tiny Volkswagens and stuff. We had fun really thinking it through. Not only kind of looking at the town and looking at the establishments and finding the parallels between what cars need and what humans need, like a restaurant to us is like a gas station to a car. And then the one we all had a lot of fun with, the idea that a tire shop is actually like a shoe store. It’s really fun.
One little detail a lot of people don’t notice is Luigi’s got that mirror over in the corner where you can try on tires. There’s a little patch of asphalt and you can look and see how your tire looks on that patch of asphalt in front of the mirror. It’s that kind of detail that we love to put into these films. It’s one of those things where honestly, when you watch it the first time in a theater, just sort of goes by. That’s one of the things I love about making movies for the theater, but also thinking that they’ll be on DVD. There’s so much detail it’s impossible to see first time through but the second, third time that you see it, you’re able to pause things and really study it. The detail is there. We sweat every little bit of detail.”
What are the new challenges in Ratatouille?
“The rats themselves. Our new movie Ratatouille is about a rat that wants to be a fine chef. It’s a story about following one’s passion against all odds. And what odds, because a rat to a kitchen is death to the kitchen. Kitchen to a rat is death to the rat, so those are pretty big odds.
One of the challenges that we had with that is that in the principals of animation, there is a technique called ‘squash and stretch’. It’s been a part of our animation from the very beginning. As a student animator, there was one of the early, early tests that you do. You start with a bouncing rubber ball but then you’ll also then go onto what they call a flour sack. It was something I learned, it’s like the old cloth sacks of flour. If you take it and lift it up, you could see it kind of stretches out. Then you drop it and it goes [splat]. You can kind of move in all different ways. What happens is it’s constantly flexible, however it never changes volume. It maintains the same volume. That’s the essence of squash and stretch and it’s represented like that. That is something, by nature, that hand-drawn animation’s been able to do extremely well. You look at the Seven Dwarves, Dopey and Doc and Grumpy and all that stuff. They were doing it back then so well.
It’s something that you haven’t seen in computer animation. The Incredibles, we did an amazing job in getting the feeling of bone structure underneath, with muscles and skin and the clothing on top of that, which was totally unique and hadn’t been done before to that level. But still, it didn’t quite have that Seven Dwarves level of squash and stretch that we love so much as animators. So when we started with Ratatouille, we said we want to solve this. We want to figure out a way to get really, really flexible.
One of the things also, just like in Cars where we studied the cars, studied Route 66, studied every aspect of it and the physics of the cars, same goes for the rats. We have these pet rats in the animation department that we watch. You see how they move; they curl up into a little ball, they stretch out, they climb under things, they climb over stuff. It’s unbelievable. That’s been a very exciting development. When you see the characters and you see them moving around, it’s pretty special. It’s unlike anything you’ve seen. It’s very natural for the world we’re creating in this kind of cartoony world that takes place in Paris, France in the countryside, the French countryside, but it’s really special. You haven’t seen this in computer animation before.”
Do you have advice to give to animators?
“Well, what I would recommend is, what’s the most important thing to do, as you kind of are learning to do animation, is don’t get seduced by the software or the tools. Take time to learn the fundamentals, the fundamentals of animation. You could learn those either in hand-drawn animation or computer animation, but it’s not about the software. It’s about what you do with it. Learn basic design. Learn how to draw because it’s still, even with the use of computers, it’s the easiest way to get your idea from your head so that you can communicate with other people. So often I see people kind of bypass, they think these fundamental basic classes that teach you basic design, basic drawing, basic all these things are boring because I want to be making stuff with all these new tools that are out there. But the most important thing is to realize that the tools will change. They have tremendously in the time I’ve been working, but it’s what you do with the tools that makes the difference. It’s the story and it’s the characters.”
