Q&A: Pixar animator talks character design, upcoming ‘The Good Dinosaur’

Pixar character developer Matt Nolte discovered his future job in third grade.

Gifted with a book on animation for Christmas, Nolte recognized the work of Bill Peet, the artist who illustrated the children’s books he checked out at the library. Nolte became fascinated with the idea of telling stories through animation when he learned that Peet worked for Disney prior to illustrating books.

He never believed his love for drawing would amount to a job, he said, but since 2004, Nolte has worked for Pixar as an animator, character designer and most recently, the character art director for the studio’s upcoming movie “The Good Dinosaur.”

Nolte spoke at a Campus Events Commission event on campus Thursday about “The Good Dinosaur” and the work he designed.

The Daily Bruin’s Kelsey Stern spoke with Nolte on his career at Pixar and how his character designs are developed into the final version that audiences see on the silver screen.

Daily Bruin: You started at Pixar as an animator on “Cars,” and now you are the character art director for “The Good Dinosaur.” Can you tell me the different tasks these roles involve?

Matt Nolte: Animation is what people see on the screen; it’s the acting and performances of the characters, so it‘s really what makes you cry or laugh. It‘s done on a computer tool. My childhood was ‘Oh, you draw as an animator,‘ and it’s a little different these days, so the option to draw is to do development work. I drew a lot during animation and would send it to the art departments. An animator named Tony Fucile gave me my first drawing job on “Ratatouille” while I was still an animator. From that, it got me in that world, and then I was grabbed onto “Brave“ full-time.

DB: So you prefer the creative character director position?

MN: Yeah, it was something I never foresaw; I thought I was going to be a 2-D animator my whole life. But becoming a designer allows me to draw and sculpt, and it‘s really what I wanted to do after all, create characters.

DB: What methodology do you use when designing characters?

MN: It’s more of a philosophy, I think. I approach anything very emotionally; I try to relate to a character in some real way. I believe to make it believable, it has to be believable to the person designing it.

DB: You created Merida in “Brave,” Pixar’s first female lead character. Was it more of a challenge designing her than designing an animal like Arlo in “The Good Dinosaur”?

MN: Yeah, because I grew up drawing animals, I never drew a female character. But it was definitely one of the most difficult characters I ever had to face. But, luckily, I wasn’t the only one. Tony Fucile had taken passes on her, and I was inspired by those. I had things to pull from, and I relied on that heavily in the beginning.

DB: Can you explain how sketches on a page are transformed into 3-D animations?

MN: Essentially, the sketches on paper that we do are ideas for shapes. And then, eventually, there has to be a puppet sculpted into the computer, and they base those shapes off of the drawings. The drawings are then never really seen again.

DB: How do you balance bringing in your own style and meeting the studio’s expectations?

MN: You work with other artists and if you get put on a show that doesn’t match your personal style, you bend quickly. You are constantly changing and growing, and at the end of it, after several shows, you find that you have a bigger palate of choices to use. I‘ve grown a lot in different directions while I’ve worked on different things.

Compiled by Kelsey Stern, A&E contributor.