Abominable director Jill Culton on the trials and rewards of 30 years in animation

Jill Culton began work on her yeti movie Abominable seven years ago, drawn to the possibilities of an adventure movie focused on a determined female protagonist. The animator would eventually depart the film, then called Everest, only to take it back from another pair of directors years later. By the time Abominable hits theaters this week, it will join Smallfoot and Missing Link as the third film about yetis to release in the span of a year, arriving at a zeitgeist moment it may have kicked off if things had gone a different way.

But Culton, who worked on A Bug’s Life when Antz was released, doesn’t let the timing get to her. A veteran of the animation industry, she knows that sometimes that’s just what happens.

“I guess yetis were in the air,” she jokes.

Culton started her career 29 years ago in the early days of Pixar and pioneered the transition from 2D to 3D animation. In 2006, she became the first woman to co-direct a 3D animated film with Open Season. Abominable is notable for Culton, Dreamworks, and the industry as a whole: it’s the first female-led 3D animated film starring a female protagonist.

With Abominable out in theaters this week, Culton sat down with Polygon to talk about her seven year journey to bring Abominable to screen, how a “bunch of kids” made the first Toy Story, and the most noticeable changes in the animation industry over the past 30 years.

DreamWorks

Polygon: You began work on the movie that would become Abominable seven years ago — where did the inspiration come from? What drew you to the project?

Jill Culton: I was working at Sony at the time and Dreamworks had asked me to come over and take a look at some of their projects. They always pitch projects that are in various degrees of development — some have full scripts, some are just an idea. The one I really gravitated to was a yeti movie. It was a blank canvas. I agreed to do that, wrote up the treatment, and then that led to the script.

I got this movie with just a whiff of that concept. Sometimes when you get that it’s a challenge. It’s a little terrifying. I’ve been doing story for about 29 years and what I know is that some of the best places to start are with your own experiences that resonate to you, because if you pull and draw on your own life as an influence, a story becomes a lot more grounded. I knew I wanted a really strong female lead. That was one of the things that was important to me.

I grew up on a lot of the princess movies and I was never that girl. I was like a skateboarder, surfer. I liked camping. I never really had an awareness of what I looked like growing up. I think sometimes, when you look at the main characters in those movies that are wearing like flowy dresses and all that, you’re like [makes a confused face]. It was really important to me that I created this strong independent, stubborn girl, who was wearing whatever she felt. Her whole outfit feels like she made it up. It feels very individualistic. I wanted her to really drive the movie based on her passion for getting this yeti home.

Dreamworks

With the rest of the characters, it’s fun. We do a little bit of a gender play with Jin, who is the boy. Usually the boy is the rough and tumble, but Jin doesn’t want to get his hair messed up or his kicks dirty or sleep out in the woods, but Yi is fine with that. But really, that’s modern day kids. I think that’s just a portrait of modern day, just trickled into film.

That aside, I was very intrigued by the relationship between Yi and the yeti. Part of it is this classic masculine-feminine play-off — it’s Beauty and the Beast, it’s King Kong. But I love this idea that the two of them would bond without words. He’s a non-verbal animated character, which doesn’t happen that often because it’s hard to hold the whole movie without them having a communication with him speaking. But I knew I could do it. Part of the reason I knew that was because I’ve had dogs my whole life and I know when they’re hungry or when they need to be fed.

The design of Everest, the yeti in Abominable, is so distinct and adorable. You mentioned dogs — was that the inspiration?

My character designer, Nico Marlet, designed Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. He is a spectacular designer. The one thing we talked about a lot was not just trying to — if you type in “Yeti” on the Internet, you’ll just see all characters standing like a man in a suit on two feet. I didn’t want it to be recognizable as a yeti, but something you’ve never seen before. Nico and I talked about that, how great it would be if for movement purposes, he could stand on fours and twos if he wanted to or roll up into a snowball to disguise himself. Nico also has three fluffy white dogs that he’s always called his little yeti. With early designs, I was like, okay that just totally looks like your dog. He can’t be a Shi Tzu!

We just refined it to the point where he needed to be appealing and really adorable at times, but also wanted him to be very fierce — like at the beginning of the movie when he breaks out, I just wanted his silhouette to feel strong and fierce. So that whole long back fur that could stand up and kind of look like spikes, that was part of that design conversation. But also just that really nice mask that he put where you can just look at his face, his eyes, his expression. Design wise, that’s such a great element to use.

It was so great that we talked to the marketing department about just using that on the campaign and now it’s everywhere. We were just down in Times Square and I’m like Oh my God, we have a whole block of just this face!

Was the movie always meant to be set in China or was that something that evolved with the partnership with Pearl studios? How did that shape the story?

I think the great thing that lent itself to China and our partnership was that the only thing people really know about yetis is that they live on Mount Everest or in the Himalayas, right? It borders China and dynamically as a storyteller, I was thinking, okay, if this is my bookend and I want to end up in the Himalayas, which is this vast, horizontal, white clean plane, where is the totally opposite place I could find him? The verticals and the neon and the glass of a big Chinese metropolis felt great.

Knowing that those were the bookends, I got a huge map of China, and when I started writing the film, the first thing I did was plot the logical path. As I started to do the research, it was amazing to me how much of China I haven’t seen. It’s an amazingly beautiful country. I started plotting this things and ended up in Chengdu and I’m typing up something and like what is this Buddha statue? The Leshan Buddha, the tallest Buddha in the world, completely carved out of rock — why did I not know this exists? Like even the canola fields are so yellow and so perfect. The yellow mountain with the stairways — I had to create a set piece there.

As a storyteller, you kinda work on two things at the same time, but the beauty of China was a big influence. My production designer Max Boas, he really embraced it. We talked about really highlight each location in a color palette. The Gobi desert is so orange. The canola fields as a signature yellow. Also in a travel movie, you don’t feel like you’re traveling if you don’t completely switch a color palette. Even if you’re going from the Yellow Mountains to the Buddha, if they’re the same color, you feel like you’re right here. That’s just color theory. But it was fantastic and it was really fun to work on.

DreamWorks

You stepped off the project, another team took over, then you came back. What was that like to come back to?

It was interesting because the initial idea was a pretty strong idea and we’ve had a really great screening and then a lot of stuff happened at the studio and I was off it for a while. When I came back to it, the story had taken a real left turn and gone somewhere completely different. There was a guitar and stuff. The new boss that had come in at the time, I should say, or the new head of the studio, he wasn’t in love with that story. Basically someone said, have you ever seen Jill’s version? And so he watched it and he called me and he said, would you come back and do that version?

And he goes, there are a couple things we need. We have extra characters we’ve built. Can you incorporate them into the story? And so literally that’s where Peng and Jin came in. They were different personalities, but I put them on the journey along with it. I think the movie is the better for it, honestly.

You’ve been in this industry for 29 years. What was it like as the industry transitioned from 2D animation to 3D animation?

It’s so funny because I just graduated from CalArts and I had taken about six months, I should say, to get my portfolio out to become a Disney animator. [Hand-drawn] is what I went to school for. I did a Disney internship, but I needed two more minutes on my reel to skip being an in-betweener and just become an animator. I had a mentor who was telling me to just do that.

Finally, I got all that stuff ready and then I got a phone call from Pete Docter who was a really good friend of mine at school, and he said “Hey Jill, we’re going to do a feature up here at Pixar and we’re looking for 12 animators. Do you want to be one of them? Can you FedEx your stuff?”

So I did. And he said, “Well, the company would like to fly you up here and show you the studio.” I said, “Nah, just come.”

I was, like, 21. So me and a group of my friends basically started at Pixar. I lived in a little hippie shack in Mill Valley. We started off all on the same day and they’re like, okay, so this is going to be a little painful because today we’re going to learn Unix and we’re like, what? There’s math involved?!

It was so funny and so hard at the beginning because the software broke every day. I just think about those times and I actually think about John [Lasseter] pioneering that and the faith he had to have in this totally crazy idea that we could do a feature — there had only been things done that were like three minutes long — that we could do a feature on the computer. We struggled through Toy Story, but it turned out great. Who knew it would change the course? We were just a bunch of kids. The company kept growing as we were working on that. I helped develop A Bug’s Life.

Then I came back to L.A. For a couple of years and I worked on Cats Don’t Dance as a 2D animator. I kinda wanted to do 2D because I felt the shift happening. I was like, wait, I’ve always wanted to do 2D, I’ve never gotten to actually be on a 2D movie. I taught at CalArts and I did that movie.

Then Pete called me to come back and he said, “Guess what? I got my own movie, will you help me develop it?” He and I and a very small team of people developed Monsters Inc. from scratch, which was very fun. Meanwhile in the middle of Monsters Inc., we kind of got yanked off to work on Toy Story 2. I boarded on that. I designed Jesse, the cowgirl doll. I got to do a lot of fun things like that.

Pixar

The company itself was so small when we started that when you grow with the company, you kind of get pushed into higher up positions. I feel really fortunate to have had that opportunity where I got to be an animator, storyboard artist, a character designer, a visual dev artist — I mean I got to do it all. And also see my very close friends [do that]. I remember Andrew Stanton. We had gone through multiple writers on [...] Toy Story. He finally said, “This is stupid. I’m just going to start writing this.” Then the next movie he wrote and directed himself, so I got to see that evolution.

One thing about my time at Pixar that was very amazing to me was that story and the heart is the most important thing. I think that has really influenced my storytelling. Now 29 years later, it’s weird — you say “she was on the forefront” or “a pioneer in the field” and I just think, how did this happen? I feel lucky, you know, I feel really blessed and I was surrounded by a lot of support. And once I left Pixar to go to Sony, I was like, wow, it’s the wild west out here in L.A.

You got Sony’s animation department off the ground. What was the transition from working at a more established studio to a fresh one?

They had a small treatment [for Open Season] that they had given to me and I had been asked to direct a couple of other movies before that. I remember talking to my boyfriend Eric and saying I don’t think I’m going to do it. He goes, why? You keep getting asked to direct. It was one of those things where you look around and you’re like, oh, I guess I am ready. I’ve done all these jobs and I actually learned from having directors that were harsh at times and directors that were very kind of times that I respected these artists and I knew I could take them with respect and that would be a good thing as a director. So I dove in and I had this weird nostalgic feeling like Open Season was going to be like Toy Story

There was a lot of good will that comes from doing a “first one.” But they’re really hard because the studio isn’t ready or prepared for that much render. Even the pipelines of the structures. I mean, you have people that have never modeled characters before and so there was its own struggle. But I look back fondly on that one. It was chaotic and crazy, but I’ve had so many animators that I’ve worked with over the years go, “That was my favorite film to work on.”

You started out in art and animation, then moved onto story and directing. What’s that transition like?

Once you get to write and direct, it’s hard to go back. It’s weird. I miss sometimes being able to focus on one little piece. I’ll use this as an example and this is something Pete Docter actually talked to me about when he became a director for the first time. He kept trying to animate and I said, Pete, you’re a director, you don’t have to animate anymore.

He put it to me this way and now I fully understand this. He said, “You train your whole life to be the first chair, cello player in an orchestra. And then suddenly you become the conductor and you don’t get to play anymore.”

There’s a weird feeling in that where you’re now looking at everything. You can’t just focus on the one. So a lot of us who were trained in specific crafts to be artists — not just artists, but we trained to be the best artists. Then when you become a director, your job is to look at all of the artists and make sure it’s all funneling towards the greater good. And your artistic background, it doesn’t mean you never do art anymore, but all these fields that are all these areas I’ve been able to work in have totally helped me become a director because I’ll work with the storyboard artist and I can grab a pencil, and be like well why don’t we try, you know, blah, blah blah.

Or I can look at a design and know that it’s not working. I think it’s great being here. I’ll tell you the one thing I miss is hand-drawn animation. I loved being an animator and being in my office all day with pen, pencil, pencil and paper and flipping. There’s something visceral about that. I miss it a little. I’m glad that this year there’s Klaus coming out with Netflix. Sergio [Pablos] is a good friend of mine and it’s fun to see the 2D animation coming back.

I do miss 2D animation.

Did you ever do it? It’s so weird. It’s the most micro-macro thing. You just get into this little space. What I love about it, is that the skill of drawing gets better and better. ‘cause you’re doing it 10 hours a day and there are moments where you stop and you pull out like an image that you’ve done and you think in your head, I drew that?!

It’s very exciting and you’re holding it in your hand. That’s the hardest part about 3D animation for me...

You don’t have the tangible product?

Yeah! When I became an animator on Toy Story I was like I can’t hold it! A lot of designers still work with pen and pencil. Like Nico, the character designer here, he would not design on the computer. He only touches it to scan his images. His drawings are beautiful and I think there’s enough artists in our industry that still do that, but all of us feel pretty satisfied when we hold Nico’s drawings — ah, it’s so great! A real life drawing!

In recent years, details about the workplace culture at Pixar has surfaced did you feel any of that during your time there?

When I was there we hadn’t even moved to the building where they are in Emeryville. Where we were, our first screening room was a bunch of thrift store couches and chairs and a pull down screen that would like go like this [makes gesture of a screen unfurling] when you’re watching animation dailies. It was not state of the art. It was not what it has become, with so many productions happening at once. We were a very small group of people that did one movie at a time. It grew quite a bit after I left. It’s gone through so much lately. I wish them all well and I still love that company. It taught me everything I learned.

I have a feeling ... Pete Docter’s now in charge of that and I have a lot of faith in him. Jim Morris is the president. I think they’re both outstanding and insanely creative people.

But on a more positive note, there have been a lot more women in the industry — especially in directing and producing roles. What do you think this means about the kind of stories in animated films that we’ll see going forward?

I think it’s inevitable. I don’t make the hard line between like women’s stories in men’s stories. But I think there’s a voice for all of us and I think when we open it up to a more culturally diverse set of directors and voices, we’re going to get that difference. We’re going to get it through women and everything else. I think it’s time. There are movies for everybody right now.

Yes, but I think it’s time that the industry just explodes. This is a good thing to say. When I was at CalArts 29 years ago, in my class of 90, there were four women. In the class right now at CalArts it’s 60% women and 50% Asian. If you look at that and give it another 10 years, that’s going to be the industry. It’s pretty exciting to look at. It just moves so slowly, but I think it might pick up momentum, I do. I think the the more directors that are culturally diverse, the more women that come in, it won’t become such a “thing.” It will open the doors. I feel like the flow will start happening. I feel like we’re maybe on the cusp of that.