Lee Unkrich, the Pixar director behind the Oscar-winning animated hits Toy Story 3 and Coco, gives a speech at the 14th China International Cartoon & Animation Festival in Hangzhou recently. [Photo provided to China Daily]

After deciding to set a fable against the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, Unkrich and his Pixar creation team did a lot of research, including visits to Mexico, where the team spent time with local families, watching documentaries and even inviting some Xolo dog breeders and their charges to the Pixar studio to study the symbolic animals.

Xolo canines are a hairless breed with a 3,500-year history in Mexico, where locals believe the dogs possess a supernatural power to ward off evil spirits.

It took hundreds of animators six years to create the vibrant world of Coco, during which time they had a major creative obstacle to overcome-skeletons are usually considered scary to most people.

"When we first announced that we would make a movie set against Day of the Dead, people thought Pixar was making a horror movie," notes Unkrich. "Of course, we knew it wasn't. We were going to make a comedy about family and love.

"In my mind, a skeleton is just another form of regular people."

In order to make the skeleton characters appealing, Coco animators made them with eyeballs, lips and vivid facial expressions, even taking inspiration from some of Pixar's most famous characters by digitally transforming them into skeletons to study the movements of their bones.

Speaking about the key to the enduring success of Pixar, the animation giant that now has 19 feature films to its name, and for which Unkrich has worked for the best part of two decades, he believes it's the animators' understanding about life that makes it work.

"Sometimes the story might be fantastical, and might not seem like being about us, but most of the time, underneath, it's often about things that are important to us as people or a society," he explains.

Recently embarking on a whirlwind tour of China-taking in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou-Unkrich says he has accumulated plenty of significant experiences of local life, which may inspire his future works.

"As we have traveled a lot, we discovered a lot of things and asked many questions, which has been similar to the journey that I undertook while making Coco," he notes.

However, Chinese audiences won't have to wait too long for a Pixar film rooted in Chinese culture, with Unkrich revealing that Domee Shi, a Chinese-Canadian, is about to become the first female director in the studio's 32-year history when she releases her film Bao (Steamed Bread).

The animated short centers around a mother whose children have all left home and who gets another chance at parenting when the eponymous dish comes to life.

Bao is set for a summer release alongside Pixar's much anticipated superhero sequel, Incredibles 2.