Andrew Stanton

Blessings Counted: Andrew Stanton
The star director of Wall-E and Finding Nemo on movies, musicals, and his lack of maturity

1. AUTHENTIC AWE When working on Toy Story, all of us at Pixar talked a lot about the elusive thing we were trying to capture: wonder. You either sincerely arrive at wonder or it entirely eludes you. I don’t know if we always get there, but I know we’re always trying.

2. HOME MOVIES My family didn’t do afternoons at the ballpark. We had the weekend trip to the movies. We knew we were going somewhere as a family, where stories would be told with sound and pictures. Even when the stories were not great to me, the experience always was.

3. SUPERHEROES I’m working with all of my inspirations. I not only work with guys like Brad Bird and John Lasseter—gods of the animation world who are on par with the George Lucases and Steven Spielbergs—but I’m on a first-name basis with them. Not only that, I argue with them.

4. PLAYING AGAINST TYPE I did musical theater all the way through high school—Fiddler on the Roof, Guys and Dolls, Godspell. But I wanted to take a different approach to animation to show that the medium extended beyond a classic story-and-song method. At Pixar, I carried the flag for a long time to break that convention. Once it was broken, I was very happy to go back and revisit Hello, Dolly! from my youth—which is a key ingredient in Wall-E.

5. NEVERLAND Animators tend to be Peter Pans: We are very attuned to our childhoods. We can still name every toy we ever owned, every show we ever watched, every imaginary friend we had. That’s how we’re wired. My outside grew up, but my insides never did. I’ve never worried about making movies just for kids; I know I’m immature enough that they’ll get it, too.

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Click here to listen to Stanton talk about his history with the 1980s TV show Mighty Mouse, his work with Pixar, and the 2012 film he’s working on.

Did you know that Stanton not only wrote and directed Finding Nemo, he also supplied the voice for one of the film’s most memorable characters? Watch this clip and see if you can figure out who he is. Hint: He’s 150 years old.

Remember what kind of fish Dory was? Can you name which actor has been in every Pixar film? Take the Pixar film trivia quiz to test your knowledge.