4. Look at some classic illustrators.

Pete Docter: “There are some great cartoonists we drew from, like George Booth in The New Yorker, who has a bunch of really grouchy, wizened old guys who are hilarious.”

Jonas Rivera: “Great caricature distils the image to its core.

“Pete had us look at Hank Ketcham, the guy who created the American Dennis The Menace. He’d draw this simple shapes, like the mother’s dress and Dennis’s hair, which were almost more believable and expressive than anything else.”

5. Always respect the techical guys.

Pete Docter: “We wanted things to at first blush, appear simple, but if you look closely, they’re complicated.

“So Carl is a basic box, but he has all the range of expressions. You see surface details like wrinkles, though on first glance he has a lot of detail.”

Jonas Rivera: “I thought it would be easy to do the stylised, cartoon look of Carl and the others. I actually asked the technical guys, ‘can’t you just dial down the detail from something like Wall-E?’

There’s this unwritten rule that the Technical Directors, who drive the CG work, can’t say, ‘can’t you just tell us what you want or give us the script?’ while directors can’t say, ‘can’t you just dial it down? Or make it look like underwater?’ You have to have the camps respecting each other and part of my job is to be referee.