When Scott Clark ’96 IL first did a Wintersession internship at Pixar his senior year, he had no clue that more than a decade later he’d be leading the world’s best animation crew and helping the company produce one extraordinary hit after another. Now, with an incredible line-up already behind him – A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, The Incredibles, Cars and that great Academy Award-winning short Geri’s Game – he’s excited to have played a pivotal role in Up!, which opened last week and has already started getting rave reviews.

As supervising animator on the film, Scott managed the efforts of three directing animators and a team of nearly 70 at the peak of production. As with other Pixar projects, he appreciated the challenges involved – in this case, making a film starring a curmudgeonly 78-year-old named Carl Frederickson (voiced by Ed Asner).

“As soon as we had Ed on board to do the voice, we had Carl,” Scott says. “You heard him and you had the character. It gave us something to hang the animation on.” But when co-writers and directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson wanted their protagonist to look like an old man “who had literally shrunken in his suit and was swimming in this thing,” Scott explains, the animators came up with a guy who “didn’t look like he had any knees or elbows.” So he worked with his team to lengthen the old man’s limbs so that people could see a break in the cloth where his arms and legs bend.

“Carl is probably the most caricatured animation we’ve ever done,” Scott says. “But it’s a real testament to our animation crew that they could actually get complex emotions other than just cute or happy out of Carl and Russell [his 8-year-old cohort]. They do some pretty heavy scenes, with great acting.”