Loop, the latest Pixar SparkShort available on Disney+, has made history by introducing the studio's first autistic character, a nonverbal canoe-loving girl named Renee. It's a quieter, smaller-scale short than Pixar typically makes, but as usual, the studio's attention to detail is impressive.
CBR's Reuben Baron, himself autistic, spoke with director Erica Milsom and producers Michael Warch and Krissy Cababa about how they managed to do right by the autism community in their film, as well as getting the scoop on the future of Pixar's shorts program.
Note: Parts of this conversation have been condensed for clarity.
CBR: How did the idea for this short come about?
Erica Milsom: When I had the opportunity to do a SparkShort, I thought a lot about what kind of worlds we haven't explored at Pixar. We've been to outer space, we've been inside a person's body, we've been with rats in a kitchen. And I was like "What are we gonna do?" I had to really rethink the way I was approaching the creative process, and say "What is a world I've been a part of that maybe other people haven't, or would be fun to explore?" I thought a lot about work I've done in different contexts for folks with disabilities.
Years before, I had been working at an arts center for folks with disabilities and taught an acting for the screen class there. And it was amazing, super fun, but there were a lot of people who communicated differently than I do in that space. I started to think about interactions that we had and how it could feel like there was a world between us that I didn't quite know how to approach initially, and it would sometimes feel awkward and uncomfortable. But in resolving that, you would have these really profound and interesting relationships with people who you previously didn't know you could understand or connect with.
So that became the world I wanted to explore in our SparkShort. And then I also thought a lot about how many of our shorts are pantomime shorts with no speaking roles. I knew I wanted to have one character who spoke, but I've worked with a lot of people who are nonverbal who vocalized a lot. I thought what an amazing opportunity if we could have a character who is speaking her own language, using a whole different set of tools to communicate. Wouldn't that be an amazing animation opportunity?
So thinking about what Pixar hasn't done before, Loop's unique in that it's one of the only Pixar films -- I think Geri's Game might be the only other one -- that's entirely about human characters in the real world with no fantasy elements. Do you think there's potential for Pixar to explore more realistic stories like this in the future?
Milsom: That is such a great question! It's so hard for me to say what other filmmakers are gonna wanna do. I think for me it was really fun. At first I was like, "Am I not living up to the magical potential of the medium?" But to redirect the story towards something that's so human and see how their tool set works in that storytelling medium was amazing. So yeah, I think we could, but I am not the one who makes those decisions.
Michael Warch: I hope there's an opportunity to do more of this social realism-type stuff. I think Erica was the perfect person to realize that in a short because of her background as a documentary filmmaker, and even her live-action shorts had that same social realism genre to it.
Krissy Cababa: I agree. I don't know. I think because we work in animation, there's a tendency to want to use some kind of fantastical element that isn't present in the real world.... There's just a lot of temptation to do that. But I do think that, as we keep exploring new worlds, that there's a great possibility for us to tell stories that would be based in people's real lives. I think that would be really interesting.
American animation in general leans towards fantasy stuff, but looking at anime, there's lots of fantasy anime, but also films like Tokyo Godfathers or Only Yesterday that're finding interesting ways to use animation for different ways of psychologically telling real-life stories.
Cababa: It's similar to when I think of literary science fiction, there's different kinds of science fiction. There's spaceship science fiction, there's future science like genetics and such, but there's also social science fiction which to me always seems to be based more in real human stories and emotions. I think that's as interesting as anything else.
Milsom: It's funny, because I do the "Making Of" documentaries here, I hear [The Incredibles director] Brad Bird talk about this point he likes to make about how animation is often referred to as a genre, but it's actually a medium, and the difference is you can tell any kind of story in a medium.
Tell me about how the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network got involved in the production.
Milsom: When I first started this film... the SparkShorts are done really fast and they're not huge productions, but I felt I really needed to find a formal advisory group of autistic people, and ideally someone who has been or is nonverbal and can comment on our performance and our portrayal to help us make sure we are doing a great job. I was really aware of the idea of "Nothing about us without us." I wanted to do this in collaboration with autistic people, so I honestly was on the internet for months before this started listening to autistic people on YouTube and all over the place trying to get that voice in my head, and talking to my friends who are autistic. But finding a formal advisor, I just looked [Autistic Self-Advocacy Network] up on the internet and was like "Oh my gosh! This group is amazing!" I read some of their books and researched them and figured that's who we needed as an advisor. Michael and Krissy managed the relationship.
Warch: I was most involved early on in finding the voice talent and we went to a local community group, Creative Growth, and they invited us to interact and observe their artists who were on the spectrum. It was over there we found our voice talent. We were really intent on finding someone who could be our voice talent who was autistic. That was an interesting process. We had to really battle a bit to get the studio to accept this, knowing it would be difficult not just to find the person but to direct them, so I really admired Erica's perseverance in sticking to her guns on that.
Cababa: We had two advisors from the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network and they were so helpful to us. They watched the work-in-progress version of our short twice, once before we'd started making animation and then once when we were close to finishing animation. It was really great to get their feedback on what to them was feeling real, what felt funny and sad and how we might help our character Renee be true and honest and have real reactions.
One of the most helpful things, when the short was almost finished, we got two really important notes. The first was expressing how painful it was for both of them when she's lost her phone, and that gave us permission to push for a shot that Erica wanted but we didn't think we could do, which was that end shot of the phone in the rice bowl... They explained to us how important the phone is as a communication tool for them, so that was a great note. The other note is a little harder to go into detail, but the headline is they helped us really figure out what Renee's point of view would be, in a stressful time and in a calming time, and that was super helpful for us in developing the look of the film.
We also were really psyched that one of the advisors we had was nonverbal as a child, so that was really helpful insight to have.
Beyond the advisors, are there any autistic artists at Pixar who were involved in the production?
Cababa: Not that we know of. We did have some members of the crew with family members on the spectrum, but no one on the crew identified themselves to us that way.
Warch: There were many people with children [on the spectrum], so it was a real close experience that they'd had with that.
Milsom: Our story artist Matthias De Clercq, whose child is on the spectrum, he was both the head of story and the only storyboard artist on the piece, and I think he was so excited to explore the topic with the character and had so much insight and excitement about it. Adam Burke, who was meant to be our supervisor and ended up being more a story consultant because he became ill during the course of it, his son was also on the spectrum and he was amazing at helping me in the early stages to craft the story and actually decide to make the character an autistic character. At first, I knew she would be non-speaking, but I didn't know why.
Warch: We had an internal advisory group. Even though they weren't necessarily involved on the film, we would meet with them periodically, people throughout the studio who mostly had children who were autistic, and utilized that group as well.
One thing I really liked about Loop is that Renee shows a clear sense of humor. Was this a conscious attempt to push back against stereotypes of autistic people lacking humor?
Milsom: Yay! I'm so glad you like that, because I love that too. It's funny when you're writing a story because the character is talking to you in a certain way. I didn't know what Renee was gonna do, I was just writing this story... I knew that at some point I wanted her to use some piece of technology to communicate, but what was she gonna say? And that she would put the poop icon up made me so incredibly happy! It's really funny, because in writing, there are moments when you're like, "Now I know who you are!" And when that moment came into my head, it was like, "Now I know who you are. This is wonderful."
What was it like switching producers midway through the production?
Warch: Well it was hard for me to want to leave. I was offered a promotion on the feature film Soul [coming out June 19]. It was an impossible opportunity to pass up to work with Pete Docter on what may be one of his last films, since he's now the creative director of the studio. It was unreasonable to think I could do both [Loop and Soul], so it was hard for me, and Krissy probably had the harder job of coming in cold and picking it up.
Cababa: When I picked up halfway through Loop, I was already in the depth of Float, so there was a time I was producing both shorts. That time was very challenging and busy. The great thing was that Michael had done such a great job setting up the structure of the film and making sure we had the crew we needed, so that was already in great shape. Luckily for me, I had worked with Erica before on a long-form documentary a few years ago, so we had a great working relationship and that make everything a lot easier.
At the same time Pixar's releasing all these SparkShorts online, Toy Story 4 was the first Pixar film in decades to not have a short in front of it in theaters. Is Pixar still producing theatrical shorts, or are shorts moving more towards the streaming world?
Cababa: Right now, Pixar is not producing theatrical shorts. That might change in the future, we don't know, but we have more SparkShorts in the pipeline, and that's really all I know.
Warch: I think it was a conscious decision on the studio's part to do more shorts because we can do them more cheaply with fewer resources and get more opportunities for young directors, directors of a more diverse pool of people, people of color and give more opportunity to make different kinds of movies, so I think that was a really smart decision on the studio.
I'm gonna miss seeing Pixar shorts theatrically, but I'm happy to see more of them.
Milsom: Yeah, it is certainly a conundrum. But it is amazing to have these new shorts coming out more frequently than the films do, and these new voices taking shape... As a person who got to make one, it's amazing. But also as a person who loves seeing all the SparkShorts and the ones yet to come, I'm like, "It's so great, you guys are gonna love them!"
Float is streaming on Disney+.