Luckily, I went to school at CalArts, and then ended up here at Disney, starting in the Animation Building and working my way up. I started as an animator, and then did character designing and storyboarding, and eventually, directing.

Any time you design a character for a Disney picture, especially a fairy tale, it's going to become the definitive design for that character, so you don't want to hack something out. You need to put in the kind of care it warrants if it's going to live in history.

Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!

From a psychological standpoint, Chicken Little is very important for Disney. Everything is touched by animation and if they don't refresh it, it becomes frayed at the edges.

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character, ... Even as he has gone through his coming-of-age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming-of-age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon's, but fortunately, I don't have people charging at me with swords.