Jan Pinkova

WheezysBestBud · July 13, 2009, 4:25am

I think we can all safely agree that Jan Pinkova’s character designs for the film are spectacular, but she withdrew with the film, putting all responsibility on Brad Bird. My questions are A) Why did Pinkova withdraw from the film, and B) How did Bird feel about taking over the film? The reason why I ask the latter is because I figured he would have an attitude about it since it wasn’t one of his original ideas.

WheezysBestBud · July 18, 2009, 4:54pm

Bump; I’m sure there’s someone on here who can answer these questions.

qxgnxamy · July 18, 2009, 7:57pm

I believe this thread can help you with question A (it’s about why Jan left Pixar, but there’s also some information about him being replaced as director of Ratatouille). For question B, here’s a quote from this article.

Well, I wasn’t really drawn to it. I always liked the idea and it was being Jan Pinkava’s idea and he was working on it the whole time I was making The Incredibles. That was his idea and I always loved the idea but I wasn’t thinking I was going to direct it. They had trouble—everybody loved the idea and they loved the look of it and the cast of character types and all the possibilities of the premise but they were having trouble getting the story to coalesce. It kept wanting to go off in too many different directions and a little over a year and a half ago the Pixar founders John Lassiter, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs asked me to come on the project, write a new script and kind of get in onto the big screen. So my motivation at first was respect for these amazing, really genius guys through some fluke of nature happened to get together and make a company that is actually an amazing place so I wanted to help them out in any way I could. Then my next motivation was oh my God, what have I done. I agreed to the original schedule—ahhh! It was complete fear and that so I just went through it. I described it to somebody else as driving down the freeway the wrong way and just trying to live and make a movie that made sense and fulfilled all the possibilities of Jan’s brilliant premise and just survive. We just finished it a couple of weeks ago and I’m still just …heart beating from not dying in my freeway maneuver but I’m really happy to hear you guys like it. I like it, but I’m not sure what it is. It’s a very strange thing and I kind of had to write it very intuitively and not look back because the schedule was right there ready to run me over.