the familyimage credit netflixto touch on the animation you treated the animators as actors and allowed them to have failed acts where the characters do the wrong thing mark youve worked on the animation side of likes of fantastic mr fox but was this the most freeflowing process youve seengustafson the basic process is largely the same in terms of starting with the script and recording the voices and at the same time youre generally working on storyboards and then you cut an animatic and then you go into shooting but on this i think our voice talent really informed the animation in an interesting way ewan mcgregor came on and just breathed life into this cricket we saw it immediately were like oh thats thats sebastian j cricket because there was so much warmth and he could be arrogant but you still really liked this cricket blue fairy voice tilda swinton shes just ethereal and what she brought to that character really made it resonate in a very interesting way and then we had our pinocchio we found greg mann this kid who was 10 years old and he was remarkable not very experienced but there was something so genuine and sweet and real about him del toro and unrulygustafson and unruly he could absolutely get into it in fact i think he reveled in the stuff where we asked him to be a little bit more broad and disobedientdel toro to your question the vehicle the technical parts of a movie like this are the same but where you take that vehicle is very different we staged the camera a lot more actively like liveaction we gave the camera and the actors a reason to move we went for microexpressions we went for the failed acts and we shied away from sanitized pantomime completely there are no cool poses no hip attitudes there was only humanity the failed act which sounds really easy but when you dont take a direct route between an action and the result the animation multiplies the manhours and makes it a lot more elaborate thats why we shot for 1000 days we were looking for humanity and we were looking for the craft and the humans behind this as opposed to making it look sleek and remote and perfect i want to make it feel handmade although the process steps are the same the direction in which we took the movie was completely adventurousgustafson you find humanity around the edges it is in those failed gestures its in the things that you might not think are absolutely in the moment but they make that character alive its in the eyes we put a special emphasis on reactions like watching someone listening because when as an audience or when youre watching a character listening and watching him processing information not talking but thinking thats what makes a character alivedel toro when we were animating especially on the first third of the process we