Director of Pixar’s Onward on taking his own childhood loss as inspiration for film’s story
- ‘It’s kind of a weird idea,’ says Scanlon, who co-wrote and directs Onward. ‘But at Pixar, when you pitch stuff like that they get excited about it being odd’
- He admits ‘doing a personal story is always a risk’. As for the reward, his family seeing it has brought them closer
“I think doing a personal story is always a risk,” admits Dan Scanlon, the director and co-writer of Pixar’s latest sublime animated adventure, Onward . “You put your life out there, you put your story out there, you put the stories of your family out there and you don’t know if people will react to it or connect to it. That is its own risk.”
In the case of Onward, it could not get more personal. “I lost my father when I was a year old,” the Michigan-born Scanlon explains. The year was 1977 and his dad – a chemist who worked in Detroit in the car industry – died in a car accident. Scanlon’s older brother Bill was just three.
“We don’t remember him at all. We have no memories of him. And we always wondered who he was and how we were like him,” Scanlon says.
The director has worked for Pixar since 2001, as a storyboard artist on Cars, creative consultant on Brave and Inside Out, and director of 2013’s Monsters University , the sequel to Monsters, Inc. When it came time to seek out a new idea, he told his mother he was at a loss. Nothing sad ever really happened to him, he said. It was she that pointed out just how sad it was to lose a father you never got to know.
It was a Eureka moment for Scanlon, who realised he had a chance to wrestle with his daddy issues. “That led to this idea of, ‘What if we could spend a day with him? What if we could get an opportunity to meet him?’ And that was the jumping off point.
