At Blue Sky Studios, Carlos Saldanha co-directed Ice Age and Robots and was main director on the second and third Ice Age films, as well as both Rio installments and Ferdinand, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. Now Saldanha is the director of a live-action family film featuring some hand-drawn and CG animation. Harold and the Purple Crayon, adapted from the beloved book, opens in theaters nationwide on August 2nd. (This Animation Scoop Q&A with Saldanha was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: I enjoyed this. I know it’s been in the works for a long time. What a career you’ve had in animation and now transitioning into live-action. Was this something you always wanted to do?

Carlos Saldanha: Yes. I always love to learn. I think part of my life at Blue Sky was learning. Every movie that I made was in order to learn something new and to do it. The studio closed down and then what’s interesting is the next day [after] that the studio closed down, I got a call from the producer of Ferdinand, John Davis who told me, “Look, I have this project that I think is perfect for you. It’s live-action, but has some animation. What do you think?” So when I read the script I thought that if I wanted to try to experiment with live-action this would be the perfect one because I’ll be able to to play around with something that I’m used to and at the same time learn to do a new challenge. I love this story. It was about drawing — drawing your life. That’s what I did for 30 years. Drawing my life in animation.

JM: Wow, yeah, I wanted to ask you what drawing has meant to you throughout your life being in animation and now this. This has got to be kind of a personal journey for you.

CS: It was! I connected a lot. I read the book. I grew up in Brazil so I didn’t have the book next to me but when I moved to the U.S. and I had four children, I read the book to them and I fell in love with that simplicity of the story. It’s about imagination. Never let that imagination die. And then sometimes imagination helps you draw your life out of trouble, draw your life into the future, see life in a different way. So I always loved that message. When this came through, I thought this would be perfect for me. My life career has been drawing. Since I was a kid, I have loved to draw. It’s funny how when you’re a kid, sometimes a stick figure that you draw or something much simpler that you create in your mind, that stuff becomes superheroes, dinosaurs, whatever, you know? And I think the power of that imagination is what kept me going since I was a kid.

JM: And since I was a kid, I’ve loved the color purple. It’s always been my favorite. So yes, we keep championing purple! And was it surreal for you to have the opening sequence of Harold and the Purple Crayon be the hand drawings, like we saw in the Crockett Johnson book? And then the older version of Harold, who is played by Zachary Levi, also *voiced* by Zachary Levi. Was it surreal for you to open the movie in this hand-drawn way?

CS: I always wanted that. I always loved the cartoons that they made out of the book. I thought that they were great and funny. For the people like me that read the book to my kids and for the other parents, I thought that this would be an homage to that story that deserves to be told. And I thought that animating the little kid drawing and the dragon and the balloon and all those things that I remember from the book, I thought was a way that I would start off the story. And then from that, I’ll take it to the next level. I’ll take it to the future, to him as an adult, him coming to the real world, drawing three dimensional things in the real world. But I thought that I needed to have the story to start with the book.

JM: It’s a great way to get into it. Harold, Moose and Porcupine enter the real world, and you really give Zachary Levi, Lil Rel Howery and Tonya Reynolds a lot of freedom to be very expressive with their performances.

CS: (laughs) Yeah, after all, they are animated characters in real life. To me, that was the intent. They, in a way, are cartoon characters in the real world because that’s all they knew. They knew that they were inside a world where anything was possible with imagination. So they had to carry that sentiment to the real world. And then in the real world, slowly they would learn about the reality of that, and then they will shape their personalities. They will find different emotions that they didn’t have before, like fear, loss, and all those kinds of things that make us, in a way, adults. But the beauty of it is that you can have those emotions but never forget the good ones.

JM: Absolutely. I really enjoyed watching Zachary Levi as Harold drawing with the purple crayon a lot in mid-air, and then those creations come to life. Did he really have a purple crayon in his hand and then all of that was animation, basically?

CS: Yeah, that was the idea. He had the crayon and then we will draw. And because he had to draw in 3D and he had to visualize, he had to use a lot of his imagination because we didn’t have the effects there. So I told him, “When you draw like this, you’re going to get… this is the side of the airplane. This is the wing of the plane.” So there was a lot of that kind of coaching there. But to help him, we built a skeleton of the things that he would have to draw as a guide so he would be able to draw over that. And then we would remove it in effects and then create the shape that we needed for the transformation. But sometimes we didn’t have the model and he would have to imagine something there, you know. So it was a fun learning process. He [quickly] got it, so it was very easy for him just to kind of go around and draw.

JM: Nice. There are some unique CG characters in this. Don’t want to spoil everything, but we do see the moose at one point in CG. A couple other fun creatures. How was it working with the CG and the visual effects people on more imagination coming to life?

CS: Oh, it’s a lot of fun. That’s what I felt in my turf. This is my territory. This is the kind of stuff that I’m used to and I love. The things that we created needed to be imaginative. It needs to be almost kind of like real, but not that real, especially when Ben [Bottani, as Mel] did the drawings. He did the drawings because we wanted him to use his imagination as a kid, the way I was when I was a kid. You create all these hybrid characters, spider fly, things like that, that I think was really fun to play with. And that’s the beauty of these kinds of movies. You use your imagination, but then you have the support of special effects to make those things come to life.

JM: Your narrator has a terrific voice, Alfred Molina. I met his partner Jennifer Lee at Disney last year. And Alfred has also been in Rango and Monsters University and Frozen II. He’s had some voice work over the years. Was he an immediate choice for you to be the narrator?

CS: Yes. I love him and I love his work and I love his voice. I wanted somebody with a strong personality voice, but also warmth. He brings that and it’s so incredible. And of course he loves animation. He’s been in animation. He’s married to the animator. So I think he was the perfect choice. He’s such a charming person. Once you see the baby drawing and once you hear the voice, you fall in love with both of them and you care for them. And so they need to be very special. The animation of the baby needs to be great and the voice of the narrator needs to be great. So when that came together, it was really special.

JM: There is an Ollie’s Bargain Outlet near me that I’ve gone to several times. That whole stretch of this movie is very fun. Kids are gonna go “Wow!” with what happens. The movie is set in Providence. Is that a store near Providence?

CS: No, it was a made up kind of store that we did. We shot in Atlanta, so we had to shoot Atlanta for Providence. Movie magic right there. (laughs) But you know what’s funny about that sequence in the store? I use the storyboard guide from my movies. We wanted some crazy ideas in the store, so we brainstormed. So I treated that scene almost as an animated sequence where I kinda storyboarded the sequence and created impossible creations in the store. And then we tried to make it happen in the real store with the FX guy and it was really fun. It was a really big challenge, but it was a lot of fun to see that kind of coming from a storyboard, from a drawing, to reality in shooting like reality.

JM: That’s very cool. You pull it off for sure. Still no spoilers here, but what I love about the film is there’s a good amount of heart and part of it comes towards the end of the movie. You have the opportunity to honor the author of Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson, in a very nice way. What does that element and, and having the book be a part of this story, mean to you?

CS: I think it’s about caring for stories that matter. When I read the book to my kids, the sentiment that I had is the sentiment that I wanted to pass on. And I think the book carries that. Even though the book is from the fifties… that’s why people still read them is because it’s a classic. The message will never die. That message is always with us. We are human beings. We were kids. We are grown ups. Life evolves, technology evolves, everything evolves, but those kinds of basic emotions should stay intact and should always stay alive inside of you. And that’s what I wanted to bring out of it. I wanted to not only create an homage to the author and to the book, but to the message that comes through as well.

JM: This is a really nice film, a fun film. And I wonder now, Carlos, if you want to do another live-action / animation combo, go back fully into animation, fully into live-action, now that you’ve done the Harold experience, what are you looking towards now?

CS: Oh, I continue to explore. I like good stories. I like good stories and good characters. If that takes me to the live-action world [or] if that takes me to the animation world, I’ll play it by ear. I’m open. I’m open to good stories in any shape or form. Whatever comes next in terms of a good story, I’m game.