David Lowery (director of Pete’s Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy for Disney) helms the new animated holiday short film An Almost Christmas Story, which premieres this Friday Nov. 15 on Disney+. It’s about an owl named Moon who forms a unique friendship with a girl named Luna in The Big Apple. Lowery shares what the holidays and holiday movies mean to him, along with stories about working with star John C. Reilly and producer Alfonso Cuaron. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: Congratulations on this. I was just in New York City… and you capture the spirit and the magic of the city with Moon in the Christmas tree that’s in Rockefeller Center. Tell me about wanting to get that magic of the city just right.

David Lowery: It took me many years to make it to New York City, but I felt like I knew the city growing up because of what I saw in movies, specifically at Christmastime. So it’s hard for me to separate like New York from Christmas in my head. They go hand in hand, and making this film, as someone who doesn’t live in New York City, was an opportunity to really just dig into those memories of all of those Christmas movies that I grew up loving that were set in the big city at the holidays.

JM: You’re right, New York City at Christmastime is so perfect. And this is going to be the latest entry in a collection, I think, for so many families to watch at the holidays. The animation style of “An Almost Christmas Story” is very unique. And I couldn’t fully tell… is it CG that looks like stop-motion? Did you include stop-motion and actual cardboard?

DL: It was a real journey arriving at the finished product. And I will say the entire thing is CG. There’s not a single thing in there that’s real, but it’s all tied to reality. And we, in fact, in our journey towards arriving at this final aesthetic, we went through a process of building puppets, building sets, building miniatures. And so it’s all based in reality. And then ultimately I realized to achieve what I wanted to achieve with the film in terms of the lighting, the aesthetics, the camera move, it all needed to be done digitally. But by that point, I had become so enamored with these textures that we were building that my mandate to the team at Maere Studios who was building it all was “Everything needs to feel real.” We need to understand that this city is made of cardboard and what that type of cardboard is. We need to understand that the characters are made out of paper mache. And if we were to reach out and touch them, we would know what they feel like.

Even if you look at the Christmas trees, it’s all twist ties and coffee stirs that make up the Christmas needles, but again, it was all done digitally, and it’s a beautiful example of what you can do digitally now in terms of adding texture. The thing that we love about stop-motion is that you can always… feel the artists behind them. And we’ve reached a point now with digital technology where artists who are working with a computer who are doing CG can leave their thumbprints in their work just as much as any other animator in any other medium.

JM: It looks so good and there’s such an intricacy to the look of Luna and Moon and the visuals. [Owl] Moon meets [girl] Luna. And what’s really interesting is the communication that these two characters have with each other — how they speak to each other, but not the ways that you expect. Was that challenging to get that across?

DL: One of the things that evolved the most in the screenwriting process… and screenwriting for animation I found is very different from live-action in that you write the script and you start to storyboard it and then you animate the storyboards and record voices and you start to see what’s working and what’s not working before you actually animate anything. And one of the things that was in the script was this idea that they are trying to communicate with one another but can’t hear each other because obviously one’s human and one’s an owl. And we really laid that on thick in the script. We were really exaggerating the degree to which they couldn’t understand one another. And one of the beautiful things, once we got to the animatic stage, was realizing how little we needed to get that across and how beautiful and graceful it could be. And one of the great things we realized was that all we needed to do was have them both talking at the same time and not hearing one another.

We didn’t need to underline it. We didn’t need to put the exclamation points at the end of it. We just had to have the sheer fact that neither of them were listening to one another. And yet they both gradually started to realize that they were talking about the same thing. One of the great joys of working in animation is that you get to watch that happen before you make the movie. You get to see what you need and what you don’t need before you actually start animating it. So by the time we got to animation, that through line was very refined and elegant, and it really was just a process of subtraction.

JM: A lot of powerful moments between those two. And you have an excellent voice cast, including John C. Reilly as The Folk Singer, of course the voice of Wreck-It Ralph in those two animated films for Disney. And he has a music and a rhythm to what he says and what he sings. How was it collaborating with him on what you wanted out of The Folk Singer character?

DL: It was such a joy and it was such a collaboration because initially this character was just singing. He was just the Greek chorus. And then at a certain point, I realized he needed to have something to say because he could really sort of underline what the movie was about, what made it important to me. All of my feelings about the holidays are often coming out through this character and including the thesis statement about what makes a Christmas story a Christmas story. And that was really a collaborative process with John, not just with the music, which he brought so much of himself to. He brought the song that opens and closes the film. That was a song that he brought to the studio thinking this isn’t technically a Christmas song, but it feels true to the movie. “This feels like something that corresponds to what you’re after.” And it corresponded so much that we put it right front center at the very beginning and then again a reprise of it at the end.

JM: You also collaborate with double Best Director Oscar winner Alfonso Cuaron, who has such a vision always when it comes to his movies — you look at “Roma” and “Gravity”. And now this.

DL: It was such a dream to get to collaborate with him. I’ve admired him for so long. One of the great gifts that he gave me was this beautiful script that he had written with Jack Thorne that he sent to me. And his directive to me was, “Take this and make it your own. Don’t feel precious about what we’ve written. Make this a David Lowery film.” And to know that someone in his position respected me enough to where he trusted me to take something he had created, these characters that he had come up with, the story that he and Jack had written, and to just step back and let me do what I wanted with it… I was very moved by that. He was incredible.

JM: I have to compliment you not only on this, but also “Pete’s Dragon”, which I remember seeing opening weekend [in 2016] and it was me and a few other people — and the whole rest of the theater was a summer camp.

DL: Incredible.

JM: And they were so into it. And I loved your approach to it as kind of old fashioned storytelling. Did you really feel that when it came to working on that movie? And how has the Disney experience part of your career with this and with that film been for you?

DL: I love old fashioned storytelling. No matter what film I’m making, I am often just thinking about how we would have done this 30 years ago. (laughs) I’m very retrograde in that regard. With “Pete’s Dragon”, with “Peter Pan & Wendy”, with this film, the thing I love about it is that it affords me the ability to make a movie that will be somebody’s first movie. When you’re making a movie for family audiences, they’re not just for kids. I’ve always hoped that adults will like them too, but that you know that some child will see this and this will be a formative experience for them. Because I think about all the movies I saw when I was little. The first movie I ever saw was “Pinocchio” — a Disney film. And that movie has loomed large in my life. That kind of set me on the course to being who I am in so many ways. And I think there’s so much responsibility in making films that will reach audiences at those ages. And it’s a real honor to get to make them. And one of the great places to make them is with Disney, because then you know that they’re going to find that audience.So it’s something I don’t take lightly, as much fun as it is to make them.

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