[bitwize]

Holy shit, look at this:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AQTRoWPB3n4/Tbn5O99q6lI/AAAAAAAARG...

Though it wasn't mentioned in the movie, Brad Bird described Edna as "half-German and half-Japanese". The walls of this room resemble Japanese rice-paper walls -- but the divisions are arranged as in a Piet Mondrian painting. Mondrian was Dutch, not German, but there's still a sense of Asian and European art styles mixed here. I never noticed that before.

Fuck this movie is so good.

[josephcooney]

Edna is, without a doubt, my favourite character in this movie. And one of my favourites of all time. The short film "jack-jack attack" is also very good. I think I enjoy that almost as much as the full movie.

[josephcooney]

Couldn't resist. http://vimeo.com/17346855

[tamersalama]

I thought Edna was modeled after Edith Head [1]

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Head

[bitwize]

"Q meets Edith Head" is how she was planned and sketched out, but I'm fond of these little details that make a character unique.

True story: I once was on Maui, and stopped inside a curio shop. The owner of the shop, a little Japanese woman, came out from the back and smiled at me -- and I'll be God-damned if she didn't look exactly like Edna -- perfectly sculptured hair, glasses, and all. I found myself actively looking for a secret lab behind all the blown-glass trinkets. It was only after this incident that I found out Edna was conceptualized as part Japanese; and today I wonder if someone at Pixar didn't visit the same shop, meet the same woman, and incorporate her into Edna's design.

[rhgraysonii]

I have a friend at the Savannah College of Art and Design that was a student under her who mentioned this. Apparently its quite the accurate portrayal and her students don't receive an A unless its something she would put in her own collection.

[JetSpiegel]

I thought it was the boss from NCIS LA

[Anm]

Sorry... Pixar did not invent a time travel machine just to get a character reference. (NCIS LA came five years after.)

[JetSpiegel]

Surely Linda Hunt is older than Pixar...

[drill_sarge]

I only see low res shadow maps with an awful filter. Joke aside, I find it always fascinating what detail or references are put in movies which nobody notices.

[loupeabody]

It's not so much that no one notices these details of composition. If that were the case, who could justify the disproportionate effort applied to engineering every shot? These elements of composition are about emphasizing the storytelling. It's an act of support that takes real craftsmanship and will always serve to make the final product better quality, especially to those who know nothing about composition in a formal sense.