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Calgary-born Pixar story supervisor explains the long road to an animated blockbuster

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When John Hoffman signs on to a new film, he is in it for the long haul.

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At least that has been the Calgary-born artist’s experience since joining Pixar Animation Studios as a story artist on 2017’s Cars 3, which took up three-and-a-half years of his life. That was also the amount of time he put in on his follow-up for Pixar, Luca, which begins streaming on Disney+ on June 18. As story supervisor, Hoffman was on the ground floor for the computer-animated movie, which tells the endearing tale of a sea monster who ventures from his ocean world to an Italian village in the 1950s.

Hoffman oversaw the team of story artists as they constructed the “first visual pass” of the movie, a process that seems much more trial-and-error than one might suspect for a multimillion-dollar blockbuster.

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“It’s kind of like a moving comic book that we then project up onto a screen … ” he says. “We watch these movies with (temporary) dialogue, temp sound effects, temp music and just see what’s working and what isn’t. Then we all get together in a room with the bosses of the studio and get notes. Then we tear the whole thing down and then we rebuild it again. And we do that at least eight or nine times and then eventually get a Pixar movie.”

But as story supervisor, this is just one aspect of his job. He also helps craft the story. Hoffman doesn’t write the scripts, but he spent a lot of time meeting with director Enrico Casarosa and writers Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones helping to structure and sculpt the tale.

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“We’re in a room, we’ve got cards up on a board trying to figure out what order we tell the story in,” he says. “What is the character doing here? Why is this part not working? What happens if we move this over here? We don’t seem to be setting up something right here so let’s put that over here and move that all around. Sometimes you peek into that room and all of us are just banging our heads against the wall because we can’t solve a certain problem. We can do that for days on end until an epiphany. Then you get it up on reels and it’s like ‘Uh, we didn’t solve that problem.’ You tear it all down and are back to it again.”

Yes, animation is a labour of love and certainly a team effort, as anyone who has sat through the end credits of a Pixar movie already knows. Entire worlds are created and re-created long before the voice actors — in this case, Jacob Tremblay, Jack Dylan Grazer, Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan, among others — are brought in. Often, there is a year or more worth of raw story screenings before actors are even cast.

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Calgary-born Pixar story supervisor John Hoffman. Courtesy, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Canada
Calgary-born Pixar story supervisor John Hoffman. Courtesy, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Canada jpg

“Things can change really drastically,” Hoffman says. “Sometimes things go to a Page 1 rewrite and sometimes things are like ‘Oh that played pretty well, actually. And then it’s just honing and getting stuff into focus. But, usually, the actors are brought in a little later until at least part of the story is on a little more stable ground.”

Hoffman says he was even able to get an early look at Luca when it was in its infancy. At first, it was the brainchild of Enrico Casarosa. Like Hoffman, Casarosa was a story artist who worked on animated classics such as 2002’s Ice Age, 2005’s Robots, 2009’s Up and 2011’s Cars 2, among others.

“I got to poke my head in while he was in development,” Hoffman says. “Which means he doesn’t have a story team or anything. Sometimes he is working with a writer. Sometimes he is just trying to figure the broad strokes out on his own. Enrico was someone whose sensibility I really like. He directed a short at Pixar called La Luna, which is one of my favourite shorts that the studio has done.”

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Hoffman went to Henry Wise Wood High School in Calgary and initially had plans to become a movie stuntman. But he was also obsessed with drawing. When he was still a teenager, an artist friend of his grandparents told him about the animation program at Toronto’s Sheraton College. He spent Grade 12 developing a portfolio so he could go to art school. He eventually broke into animation, working on 1997’s Anastasia, 2000’s Titan A.E. and 2012’s ParaNorman before joining Pixar to work on Cars 3.

Not unlike Cars 3, there is no shortage of wondrous elements in Luca to pique the interest of an ambitious artist. Luca is a charming and funny coming-of-age tale that also sneaks in timely lessons about friendship and prejudice. Luca, voiced by Tremblay, is a sea monster who has been kept hidden from the human world by his parents (voiced by Rudolph and Gaffigan.) But curiosity eventually thrusts him onto land, where he finds he can transform into human form. After befriending Alberto (voiced by Grazer), a fellow sea monster with similar curiosity about life out of the water, the two befriend a stubborn young girl named Giulia (Emma Berman) who is determined to show up a bully by winning the village’s annual triathlon race. Alberto and Luca, meanwhile, think a win will allow them to procure a Vespa, which they believe is key to a new life of freedom.

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It is the first Pixar film to be set in Italy, a setting the filmmakers bring to life as a quaint, old-country village teeming with music, food and colourful characters.

“There’s the universal nature of the connection of friendship and these really important friendships we have when we’re kids and how they can be very formative in regards to the people we become as adults,” Hoffman says. “I really could relate to that. And also some of the craziness Luca and Alberto get into: building their own Vespa and going off of jumps. That was definitely something I would have done as a kid as well.”

Luca begins streaming June 18 on Disney+

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