Lee Unkrich

If you look at the beginning of children's entertainment in literature, the first books that were written for kids were cautionary tales. They were books that were there to teach kids about growing up and how to live life.

I just ended up focusing on film editing as I was getting my career started. I'm very passionate about editing and will continue to edit for the rest of my career, but it's not like that was all I did and then somehow I grew into directing a movie.

We go to movies to be taken away to another place, to be dazzled, to dream, to hopefully be filled with wonder. The design of the world and the look of the film is all in service of trying to create that feeling of wonder in the audience.

When we made 'Toy Story,' we knew, even back then, that this was going to be the ugliest film we would ever produce.

Initially, when people asked us when 'Toy Story 2' was going to come out, we'd say, 'We have no interest in sequels. We just want to do original stories.'

We know that families and kids are going to be an important part of our audience, so we've always made sure that we've picked subject matter that was appropriate for kids. But I think if you try to target a movie to kids, you're going to fail.

I think the moment you try to make something for kids, you are making something really cruddy that even kids don't want to watch most of the time.

I know I'm going to send my three kids off to college someday. I know my parents will pass away someday. It's one thing to say, 'I'll be able to deal with that day when it comes,' and it's another thing to find yourself at that day, dealing with it.

Typically in animation, the characters exist in a kind of stasis. Look at 'The Simpsons' - they never age, the baby never grows up - or 'Peanuts' - the kids never grow up, they always stay the same age.

With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.

I ended up being exposed to cinema that a lot of other kids wouldn't have been exposed to.

It's important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up. We know screwups are an essential part of making something good.