FILM:SO, at just 41 years old, Pete Docter, a key force in Pixar Studios, is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Venice film festival, writes DONALD CLARKE

What's that all about? Certain hard-working film journalists, despite being a year or two older than that, still think themselves in the prime of life.

Still, if you add up the ages of the joint honourees - Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Lee Unkrich and Pixar supremo John Lasseter also got gongs - then you get a total of 230. That's all right then.

"Yeah that was a lot of fun," Docter says in his unhurried way. "It was so cool that John was willing to share the honour with us. We were there on the carpet and people were shouting: 'John! Pete!' It sounds like a joke, but we really looked behind us to see who they were shouting at."

Yet Pete Docter, whose latest film Upopens here next week, can claim a sort of celebrity. Hugely tall with a ruminative giraffe's head, the animator is, alongside the Hawaiian shirt-wearing Lasseter, one of the two most recognisable figures in the Pixar gang. Okay, this does not mean that he is mobbed in airports, but, appropriately for somebody who looks a little like a cartoon character, he has become a Pixar figurehead.

Given that responsibility, he must occasionally tire of being told that - after Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incrediblesand Wall-E, the company has produced another masterpiece.

"You know, you never can hear that enough," he laughs. "We never get blasé or casual about that. We still think: 'Maybe we've made a terrible mistake with this story choice or whatever.'"

Docter's only previous credit as director was on Monsters Inc, but Pixar is a collaborative institution and Pete has had a hand in every one of the company's features. Study the credits of Lasseter's Toy Story(re-released in 3D this week) and you will confirm that the story was devised with the assistance of Docter and Stanton. Still, the critical and financial success of Upmust give him particular satisfaction.

Earlier this year, a body of investment advisers went public with concerns about the direction Pixar was taking and advised their readers to sell Pixar stock. Wall-Emay have been one of the greatest animated features ever made, but where were the merchandising spin-offs? Now, with Up, the company was producing a film about an old man who attaches balloons to his house and flies to South America. Kids don't want to watch old men. They want to watch films about talking baboons. Who wants some old geezer inside their Happy Meal? Well, there is, it seems, justice in the world. Upbecame the third biggest film of the American summer and is still playing in cinemas. Take that, Mr Potter.

"Our simple philosophy is: if the characters are compelling and the story is interesting then people will come. Look, we have done stories about cars and bugs. Hey, a human man, even an old one, can't be that much of a stretch. The amazing thing about that article was it said 'Oh the film itself is probably very good.'"

But it probably won't sell lunchboxes?

"That's what they thought. But we never approach films that way. Jonas Rivera, the producer of Up, likes to think of the merchandise as being a little like souvenirs. You go somewhere nice and you get a souvenir to remind you what it was like."

The Pixar team is always very keen on clarifying that it leaves consideration of the bottom line to others. It must, however, be difficult to maintain that buffer zone between animators and accountants. The company has had a relationship with Disney since its early days. Have Mouse House heavies ever leaned on them to make the films more easily marketable? "I can honestly say they haven't," Docter says. "Nobody ever said that. Bob Iger at Disney has always said: 'You make the best film you can. We have other people to worry about selling it.'"

Of course, as well as delivering the best run of animated features in the history of the medium, Pixar, long based in the San Francisco area, has brought in huge profits for its corporate partner. The working practices evolved throughout the 1990s when Lasseter helped transform Pixar from a hardware developer - originally a toy of George Lucas - into the cuddly behemoth it is today. As the third animator hired by the company, Docter, a Christian from Bloomington, Minnesota, also had a hand in shaping that metamorphosis. The success of Toy Story, the studio's first feature, seems inevitable now, but in 1995 a great many analysts felt that computer animation was not suited to generating feature films. It was, surely, just a gimmick.

"Yeah. Maybe it would be like Smellovision," Docter agrees. "You know, Toy Storycame really close to being shelved. The word went out to fly the whole team down to Los Angeles. Shift the company south and let someone else deal with it. John was very forceful: 'Give us one more chance.' Four weeks later we knew we had been right to trust our gut. If we were going to go down we were going to go down our own way."

Were they surprised by the success? "It felt like a good film to us. We thought we might make our money back."

As it happened, the film went on to take $350 million at the world box-office. The company continued to thrive by exploiting a slightly paradoxical combination of reliability and unpredictability. The viewer knows that the same level of effort will be put into script as into computer animation. Consider, by comparison, the shoddy writing in Dreamworks' Shark Taleor Fox's lumbering Ice Agemovies. The viewer also knows that (the odd sequel aside) Pixar is always prepared to experiment in tone and subject matter.

Nonetheless, Uphas always sounded like a particularly peculiar piece of work. Wall-Eis about a robot. Finding Nemois about a fish. Upis about an old man who, accompanied by a boy scout stowaway, flies south in search of a unusual bird that, 50 years ago, a once-famous explorer claimed to have discovered. Fear not. The picture might be the funniest and the most moving Pixar has yet produced. At the heart of it we find Carl Fredricksen, a somewhat grumpy widower, voiced by Ed Asner and, if I'm not mistaken, granted many of the physical eccentricities of Spencer Tracy. Think of the great man in Guess Who's Coming to Dinneror It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Worldand you'll get a sense of Carl's charming surliness.

"We certainly looked at Spencer Tracy," he says. "There's a scene in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner where he's looking at this ice-cream cone really grumpily. 'This isn't the stuff,' he says. Watching his expression change really inspired us."

Okay. But what on earth was the initial inspiration for this strange film? "The notion of the house lifting off was important. And the idea of working with an old man. But actually it was like a combination of three different ideas we were developing. We suddenly realised they were all about freedom. So they just came together."

The creative process still seems slightly obscure. Then again, if it were that easy to explain then everybody would be making films as good as Pixar's. That won't be happening any time soon.

• Upis released on October 9th

Get yer glasses on

Whether you like it or not, the new, digital 3-Dis not going anywhere soon.

Today Pixar's great Toy Storyis re-released in that format. Next week, Upemerges in both 3-D and traditional flat versions. Some James Cameron thing called Avatarwill be poking us in the eye just before Christmas.

The process has made a fortune for the studios, but, though children love it, many adults (this writer for a start) have yet to be convinced.

"It affects people in different physiological ways," Pete Docter says. "It was not something we set out to do initially. We were three years into making Upand then John Lasseter said it had to be in 3-D. I said: 'Okay, but it's not going to be all ooga-booga and throwing knives at the audience.'"

Why not? In a trashy film like The Final Destination, where the 3-D is used showily, the effect remains entertaining. But, when employed unobtrusively as in Toy Storyor Up, the process rapidly ceases to matter. Why not leave 3-D to the exploitation merchants?

"I see where you're coming from," he says. "But it is, in a way, like colour. You don't need colour, but if you use it in an emotional way it can help. So when the hero is depressed in Upwe turn down the 3-D. In action scenes we spice it up."

Hmm? But we still have to wear those stupid glasses. "I see your view," he says with admirable patience.

"That's perfectly fine. One thing I am sure of is that I would love for our films to always be released in both formats. So, nobody will make you wear the glasses." DONALD CLARKE