La Luna interview

Attached as an interview with the director and producer of the upcoming Pixar short La Luna which will be attached to the new film Brave upon its release in 2012. It's interesting to see the sort of unique creative environment that Pixar's shorts provide. The director is given much of Pixar's talent and resources but is also given a the freedom to do something a bit different. Particularly, something that isn't necessarily commercial enough sell tickets on it's own.

From an animation standpoint, I found interesting the idea that a realism can be easily done with a computer but it is much harder to achieve a sort of stylized surrealism. The director specifically talks about the difficulty of achieving a Hayao Miyazaki-esque wave effect which is quite stunning but not necessarily realistic, and apparently difficult to achieve with computer animation. I think a lot of time animators and cg artists can be caught up in trying to achieve perfect realism without thinking about the fact that animation allows many other types of representation.

Here's a short clip from the film: