INTERVIEW: Coco Creator and Storyboard Supervisor, Jason Katz Talks Pixar’s New Animated Movie

Tomorrow, November 22, Pixar will release their brand new film, Coco. Coco follows Miguel, a 12-year-old boy who finds himself in the Land of the Dead. It is here where he meets Hector and the two go on a great adventure to find a way for Miguel to return home.

We had the amazing opportunity to sit down with the film’s co-creator and storyboard supervisor, Jason Katz, and talk about the new animated feature. Jason talked everything from taking his children to see the film to how they made the skeletons looks so appealing. You can find our our interview with him below.

On taking his daughter and son to see Coco: “We saw it last week at the premiere. My son is 11 and she is 7 and it was amazing. She hates Pixar films. She does. She’s very empathetic. Her perfect film is like a 1960’s Disney action film. Parent Trap, Pollyanna, that kind of stuff. She’s perfectly comfortable seeing a girl fall out a window and get paralyzed for life. Especially good ones, they’re very manipulative and they’re intended to make you feel feelings. No matter how I try to intellectualize it, and I’ll walk her through them, ‘All right, we are doing that on purpose. We want you to feel sad in this scene because the next scene is a happy scene and if you feel sad before the happy scene then you feel even happier.’ And she’s like, ‘I don’t want to hear any of this’. So her seeing it was a big deal and it was amazing. She loved it. At the end, my son was crying and my daughter was crying, and I’m totally crying for a completely different reason.”

On how their trips to Mexico influenced their movie: “As cliché as it sounds, everything made it into the film. I feel like every week we would talk about those trips constantly. We would talk about the specifics of people we met or the characters we met. There was a cousin who didn’t say a word, but he was standing in the back just looking at us the whole time. And that’s Abel, that’s Miguel’s cousin in the movie. Things like that that found their way in. The families built the ofrendas, how they reviewed their ofrendas, where they were in the house made it into the film”

On how Dante came to be in the movie: “We loved the idea of having someone for Miguel to talk to. At one point in the film it was a younger sister, but we went back down to Mexico. We found these xolo dogs and were like, ‘I’ve never seen that in an animated movie before.’ And the more we learned about him, the more we learned about how their teeth fall out and how interesting they look and we were like, ‘Alright, that has to be in movie’, so Miguel’s sister turned into a dog and became Dante. Finding Dante, that first trip was probably the biggest because it really gave us a character that we fell in love with.”

You can read the rest of our interview below. We will have our review posted later today, so make sure to check it out and let us know what you think of the movie.

On how music became a big part of Coco: “Music was something that was a big part because I feel like we knew we wanted music to be present in the movie. It was one of the ways that we related to Mexico. I would listen to ranchero music or I would listen to music on my own and had a love for it. And it would be something that as we were developing the film, we would just put on a Pedro Infante movie on Youtube and just have it playing as we would talk. It wasn’t until we went down there and started to really talk about, ‘Well, what did you remember?’ ‘Oh remember we were at that one sculptor’s house. And then we went to this show and the music there was so amazing” or ‘You know, I really felt something there. I wasn’t expecting to be so moved by that woman, when she came up and sang’. And we were like, ‘Well, that should be the movie’.”

On how important their trips to Mexico were: “When we take these trips, what it does is, it gives us an opportunity to just feel things and look around and take pictures. It also gives us a common language that as we’re trying to solve these story problems, we can reflect on that and it’s not just something that’s in my head because I read it in a book or I searched on the Internet. It’s an experience we can all draw from and that’s why it’s also so helpful to kind of continually go down there and keep sharing those experiences. Then spread them out throughout the teams because that’s how we develop our films. We’re talking about our own life experiences. We’re talking about things that we’ve all shared together.”

On how they were able to make the skeletons look appealing and not scary: “Well, it’s a testament to our art department and the ability to just try to find the appeal in these designs. Early on, we were attracted to the idea of skeletons. We were attracted to the idea of the iconography of the holiday and I think I felt and I know, Lee (Unkrich) and Adrian (Molina) and all of us early on felt that when we would look at the engravings and those visuals we commonly associated with a holiday, those never felt scary to me. Some of them are pretty realistic skeletons. So there was something there, something in that execution and in designing the world and in designing these characters, where we searched to find something that was appealing.

One of the things that we did was we took images of our characters from Pixar past, most of our human characters, so Merida and her mom from Brave and Bob and Helen from the Incredibles and Dash and Violet and, and we went through all our characters, even Woody and Buzz, and we did skeleton versions of them. Trying to search for ‘Well, we find these characters appealing. What’s a skeleton version of them that’s appealing?’ What that taught us was how to manipulate some of the shapes and how to maintain that keyhole kind of idea. But, find some variety between Hector and Ernesto de la Cruz and Mamá Imelda that not only can make something feel feminine but make it feel appealing, so it’s not scary.”

On how they created the designs on the skeletons skulls: “That kind of coloration, that sugar skull sort of a decoration, it’s something that we’ve seen before. It’s something that, if anybody has seen a photograph of an ofrenda or did a Google image search of Día de Muertos, you would probably stumble upon a sugar skull somewhere along the line. That kind of idea of ornamentation felt like, not only a way to find some variety from skeleton to skeleton, but also bring some color and bring a level of appeal to it. So you would be able to look at these characters and feel like, ‘OK, I’m not repelled. I’m not scared. I’m interested. They look nice.’ It was a combination of all that. Again, that’s the challenge of designing any characters you want it to be appealing, you want it to be something that feels interesting.”

On if they had their characters created before they found their voice actors: “Well, we had the characters long before the voices and, and usually what we’ll do is early on in the story process, we’ll try to define the characters. Either via script or through some drawings and some storyboards, and eventually we’ll storyboard the whole thing, soup to nuts. Those characters will be voiced by scratch actors. Sometimes they’re actors that work at Pixar. We’ve got a bunch of really talented people who are great actors, but they work at Pixar during the day and then sometimes we’ll find actors, local actors, to come in. For our movie especially, Lee is so good at working with voices, but we wanted some specificity. We have all kind of ages and we wanted to really find voices that could represent a Mexican grandma, an abuelita, in a way that didn’t sound like someone putting on a fake cartoon-y accent. That’s how we found the characters first, and then once we start to identify, ‘OK, that’s pretty much it. We think that’s the character. We think that who they’re going to be,’ then you go off and try to find actors that would fill that role.”

On finding Anthony Gonzalez to voice Miguel: “Miguel was tough to find and we found one boy and he was our scratch actor for a long time and then his voice changed and he was amazing. And somehow the world shined on us and we found Anthony (Gonzalez) and he was our scratch actor for Miguel. And then we fell in love with him and we were like, ‘There is nobody else in this universe’ because he’s a triple threat. He’s an amazing actor, he’s a great singer and he’s actually a phenomenal musician. He was a scratch actor that became our final voice. He’s the real deal, he’s going to be a star.”

On choosing not to make Coco a musical: “We explored all options and, I think, that we knew that we wanted music to be present in the movie and so you kind of have to try everything. Ultimately when we landed on the path that eventually became how we use music in the film, it felt like that was right for us. It’s a complex film and it’s a complex story, there’s a lot of moving pieces and there’s a lot of things that need to line up. Frankly, musicals and, really good musicals, are quite simple. The stories are pretty straightforward. And the music, the songs allowed the emotions to kind of progress. But the plot of those musicals are pretty basic. That was another challenge for us. We just were never going to have a basic film. We were going to have a fun, like Lee Unkrich, does not make boy meets girl sort of movies. It’s what I love about the puzzles that we’re putting together. I think we realized that was also an issue. That it was going to be pretty impossible to just stop the movie for seven minutes to break out into song and then pick it up again.”

On if any of the characters changed from the first draft: “Frankly, not massively. Lee is one of those types of directors that when he has something in his mind’s eye, he’s not only able to be quite consistent and accurate, but he kind of knows what he’s looking for right out of the gate. There’s little things here and there. But for de la Cruz, we always imagined this hybrid between Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete and Vicente Fernández. He needed to be this incredibly handsome, charismatic, not creepy, larger than life sort of prevalence. And he needed to encapsulate the golden age of Mexican cinema in a character. So we kind of always envision him kind of looking that way.

Mamá Imelda needed to be a regal force of nature but not be off putting and not be unloving. She ended up the way I pictured her. Hector the same way, Miguel pretty much the same way. The first drawing I did of Miguel when we first started the movie, he had a different name, but the first drawing I did of him was a boy with brown hair and a red hoodie on and we forever said, ‘Alright, well let’s find different things’ and we tried to talk ourselves out of the animation hoodie scenario because every animated character has to have a hoodie on. But it was important and it became a storytelling elements so we were like.’ Alright, we’ve got to keep the hoodie’, but nothing really super significant.”

On how they created the Land of the Dead: “We knew we had Santa Cecilia and we wanted the two cities to feel very different. Santa Cecilia was inspired by the Oaxaca region, which is mountainous, but also has this kind of sprawling flatness to it. And so we felt like the pallets would be very earthy and very warm. And then the land of the dead would be the opposite of that. But we also were inspired by our research of Mexico City and Mexico City has a whole history underneath it. We riffed off of that. Mexico City, the original, indigenous Mexico City was these pyramids around all this water, it was like a giant lake. That’s what we imagined, we started with water and these pre-Colombian, Aztecans pyramids were built. And then as people died, and as time passed in the living world, that architecture would make its way to the land of the dead. Time is basically on top of itself as you get higher. You have Aztecan pyramids at the bottom and you have indigenous architecture, pre-Colombian architecture and then you start to get more modern as you go up.”

On how they came up with the multi-generational housing living in the Land of the Dead: “Our mindset is people keep dying and if you die you go to the family reunions and someone calls your family and they come and get you and you go live in your family’s house. They add on a room because that’s how it will be, multi-generational households, and it would just keep going up, up, up. There’s not a lot of building codes because nobody needs to worry about dying, so you can build something on the side of the house and just makes sure it doesn’t fall over.”

On how they used this same mindset in their storytelling: “Those that are well remembered live higher and those that are not well remembered live lower. That’s why the scene in this kind of shanty town where we see Chicharron, that whole community is poorly remembered. They’re by the water and you see Miguel and Hector walk down these steps that are built on top of the pyramid to get down to the shanty town. Anytime the characters are going down, they’re going towards a place where they’re not well remembered. And they’re going away from Miguel’s goal. Every time they’re going up, they’re going towards de la Cruz and Miguel’s goal of being well remembered. That’s the thing about filmmaking. Everything we do is a choice. We’re making it up. Do they go right? Or do they go left? You make that choice. We make a decision early on. Everything going towards de la Cruz is left to right, anything going away from de la Cruz is right to left. When you watch the movie, you’re just feeling it. You’re not paying attention to it. But that’s the reality. He goes across the bridge from left to right. Everything going towards what we think the goal is towards the right side of the screen. It’s how we in the west read. Our brains have been taught that that’s an aspirational movement. That’s what we did in the movie. And then once you realize the truth, everything racing back to Cocoa is right to left.”

On what is next for him: “I’m made for long distance running. I’m looking forward to sitting in a room with blank walls and bouncing ideas and hitting our heads on the wall trying to figure out what’s next.”

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