Partly Cloudy

Hi, my name is Pete Sohn, and I'm the director of Partly Cloudy.

And this is the first thing I directed here at Pixar.

Partly Cloudy started off as an idea that I had as a young boy

when my mom took me to the movies.

My mother, she's Korean,

so movie experiences with her was very interesting

because she didn't speak or understand English very well.

And because we were living here in America,

every movie that we saw was in English.

Most of the time, she didn't understand what the people were saying,

or she didn't really get the gist of some of the scenes in these movies.

She would ask me in Korean, "What were they saying?"

And I'd explain and do my best to translate,

but my Korean wasn't very good,

and so there would always be these kind of little wonky miscommunications

of, "This is what that character said in the movie,"

and she would just shrug her shoulders and kind of move on to the next thing.

But there were movies that we did see that made a huge impact on me

because she could understand these movies

without having to speak or understand English very well.

One of those movies was Dumbo.

I remember my mom taking me to see Dumbo,

and I remember in the opening scene of that movie,

there were storks delivering all these baby animals to this circus train.

As a kid, I wondered, "Where did these birds get these babies from?"

And that was kind of the seed. It all started from there.

I had that idea and I'd forgot about it,

and then years, years later, working at Pixar,

I had an opportunity to pitch some short ideas,

and one of them was that seed.

Where do storks get their babies from, and what is that world?

Maybe it was like a postal service.

And, know what? What if the clouds made the babies?

They could use their lightning powers

and sculpt the cotton-like quality of the clouds that they're sitting on.

That was kind of the inception of the short film

and is pretty much what I had pitched

to John Lasseter and the other directors here at Pixar.

My first pitch of the story,

they talked about that they loved the concept, they loved the world,

and they loved the beginnings of what these characters could be,

but there was no story yet. And there wasn't.

And so I went back to the drawing table,

and just tried to come up with, "What do I want to say with this story?

"Okay, who are these guys?"

Some of my favorite stories have this personal element to it that is real.

And somewhere in the middle of the story process,

I started thinking about my relationship with my mother.

I talk about watching these movies with my mom,

but the communication barrier that I had with my mother

kind of seeped into this thing.

One of the kind of tenets of making the short was I didn't want any dialogue,