My daughters and I arrived at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Dallas, where I was to interview artist, Carlos Felipe León, for Disney Pixar’s ONWARD – which opens on March 6.

Before his role as Shading Art Director at Pixar Animation Studios, Carlos Felipe León worked as an art director, visual development artist, and color and lighting designer at various animation studios both in and outside of the United States.

Carlos Felipe Leon

I started my interview telling him that, as a Latina, I’m very proud of him and everything he has accomplished. Representation matters, not only on the screen, but behind the scenes, too!

Carlos Felipe León is an immigrant, like me, so I’m sure he didn’t think my admiration was awkward. He was raised in Bogotá, Colombia, and attended high school in Colombia and France. 

Carlos Felipe León has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Computer Animation and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering degree, and although he joined Pixar Animation Studios full-time in August 2017, he’s already working on both ONWARD (as a set designer) and SOUL (as a key lighting designer).

As a set designer, Carlos Felipe León helped design and guide the building process for the architecture and individual set pieces for the virtual worlds in which the Onward characters live. As a lighting key designer, he oversees lighting and shot compositions to convey the mood and narrative evolution of the film best. Soul is coming out this June and I already saw some things I can’t talk about, so all I can say it’s going to be OUT OF THIS WORLD!

Elyssa stayed in the lobby with baby Elydia (who was asleep in her carseat), and Eliana, who had brought her sketchbook and colored pens to draw one of her beautiful pictures.

We waited a bit and got acquainted with the Disney team and had some herbal tea and snacks. I was anxious to meet Carlos Felipe and ask him all the questions I could in the precious time Disney had allowed me to sit with him. These rare opportunities are an honor to me, something I never imagined given my humble background, and I am so very grateful to experience them, along with my children.

Interview with Set Designer for Disney Pixar Onward

I was really anxious to know if he had put any of the cultura Latina in his sets, in his designs, his creaciones. And the short answer was: YES!

For this show we had to reference very specific fantasy archetypes from old movies, and books and illustrations, but I have to say I had the chance to design the interior of the house where the main characters live, and I have to say I was thinking a lot about my own house when I grew up, so you can see a lot of that in the furniture, the carpet, and the railing on the stairs, so I think I was trying to project myself into the work in that way. It feels a lot like the house where I grew up.

This is amazing! According to production designer Noah Klocek, ONWARD “it’s the fantastic and the familiar—it’s the balance of those things.” 

“It’s a world that is initially recognizable,” adds sets art director Huy Nguyen. “There’s tract-style housing, freeways, strip malls. But then we make subtle adjustments here and there that get the fantasy element in there.”

I really can’t wait to see!

By now, you may have heard that Onward is a Pixar fantasy adventure in which Chris Pratt and Tom Holland voice the two teenage elf siblings that go on a magical quest to spend one day with their late father.

When the project was announced at D23 Expo, I was one of the few bloggers covering the event, and I was moved to tears because there was an emotional energy in the room. The project was still untitled at a time, but the title “ONWARD,” like Pixar’s UP, makes sense for the journey to me now. This is the non-impressive picture I took:

Director Dan Scanlon (Monsters University) told the audience that the story was inspired by his own relationship with his brother and their connection to their dad, who passed away when he was about a year old. A family member sent them a tape recording of him saying just two words: ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye,’ and that was like magic to him and his brother.

“That was the jumping-off point,” said Scanlon of his personal story. “We knew that if we wanted to tell that story that we’d have to set the movie in a world where you could have that incredible opportunity.”

So because we all relate to loss and longing, I asked Carlos Felipe León if he could get a day with someone that he’s lost and that he loved, who would it be? The answer got me all teary.

My mom! She passed away when I was a teenager, so I was older than they were, but that would be great. I have to learn that spell.

Don’t we all? I would probably spend one more day with my grandmother, Lidia Fernandez. Baby Elydia was named in her honor because she taught me what it’s like to feel cherished, and I had so very few opportunities to spend time with her. She passed when I was a teenager, as well.

While it’s very unlikely that we will actually get a hold of that spell, we can all learn this positive lesson that Carlos Felipe worked while working on Onward:

Sometimes you find the people around you that help bring you up and help you grow up, and you can find those in unexpected places, and I think it’s good to just appreciate the people that are around, and are a part of your life and help you grow up and become the person you are.

I love his answer so much. We have permission to hurt for what could have been, but at the same time, we must not get so lost in our grief that we miss out on the beauty of those we do have. His appreciation for those mentors in his life doesn’t take away from the love and reverence he feels for his mother.

One of the plot points that intrigued me most when I read the production notes for ONWARD was that in the suburban fantasy world where the story is set, they have access to magic, but no one really uses it anymore. “The magic has been disappearing from the world for years—it’s nearly forgotten.“

I wondered why that would be, and of course, I am yet to find out, but I asked Carlos Felipe how he feels that relates to the world we live in today.

In the film, the magic is a part of their historical past, and the reason why the characters have stopped using it is because of the convenience of modern life, and technology. The movie doesn’t try to make a big deal out of that message, but for me specifically, I think that convenience is good and everything, but sometimes when we forget to look at other important things, it may be harder to find or require a little bit of effort, or looking deeper into an issue, or traveling somewhere, or making the effort to go and visit somebody. I think that’s the way that I would relate to it nowadays.

How do you feel about this? I agree with him in many ways, especially because I grew up under circumstances that were rather inconvenient, and I can appreciate the value of both.

I then asked Carlos Felipe León to send you a special message – something about being positive or having positivity in his life that has changed him in any way before or during his work in Onward. Here it is:

I think that we’re all really hard on ourselves – I am too, we always wish we could be better, we have a lot of pressure to perform at work, in your personal life.

Something that has helped me, and I don’t mean this in a position to give advice about it, I personally think that doing your best should be good enough and realizing that there are things that are out of your control and sometimes things will work out, sometimes they won’t, but as long as you do your best and give it your best shot, and you’re honest and try to be a good person, that usually works out, and I think other people can feel it around you as well.

I would call that a positive take on things.

Yeah, he’s really humble, and he’s also right. We struggle so much with a desire to control or make things perfect, but at the end of the day, control is an illusion and “perfect” and “as is” are synonymous.

I have a different appreciation for movies, especially animated films and shorts, after I started to meet and interview the creative minds for Disney and Pixar, because they put so much heart into them and they are like their babies, in a sense, so you can get a feel for what it’s like. I love looking at their names when the credits roll, so be sure to look for Carlos Felipe León and send him positive wishes, or even give a little clap, cos I know I will!

The last question I asked Carlos Felipe León was with regard to feeling overwhelmed, or frustrated. We all feel like that sometimes, especially when we care so much about the task at hand, whether it is in our creative work or our work as moms.

I try to be good and these are the things that I try to incorporate into my own life, I try to eat well, exercise,  sleep well, do fun things, and it’s really hard to be able to balance all of that, but that’s what I’m trying to do. 

There you have it. Take care of yourself. I needed to hear that, actually. 

Onward takes us on an extraordinary quest to discover if there is still a little magic left out there, marking the first time Pixar has explored a world that features all the conveniences of suburbia!

Rather than going under the sea, into space, back in time and into the toy box, filmmakers populated the ONWARD world with elves, sprites, satyrs, cyclops, centaurs, gnomes and trolls, among other creatures from mythology, folklore, fables and fantasy fiction. 

Voice Cast for Disney Pixar’s ONWARD 

Besides having a first-class animation, design, and production team, ONWARD features an all-star cast of voice actors and actresses, including:

What positive lessons did you learn from this interview? I’m inspired by Latino ONWARD Set Designer Carlos Felipe León and I know how he has inspired you, too!

[ela]