Louise Smythe ’06: Drawing Her Way to Bliss, One Story at a Time

Louise Smythe ’06, who works as a storyboard artist at Pixar Animation Studios and contributed to “Inside Out 2” credits her time at Hutchison for building her confidence and skills.
It is a core memory that Louise Smythe ’06 treasures. “There’s a picture of me on the kitchen floor in my parents’ house, and I’m painting something on their floor, and I have this look on my face like I’m an artist. I’m three or four. I’m a little toddler, and I’m just painting with this vigor. Paper all over their floor with paint all over it.”

These days, Smythe is doing more drawing than painting, but it’s with the same vigor, and she’s doing it professionally. For more than 10 years, she has been a storyboard artist at Pixar Animation Studios in Northern California. Her most recent credit is as the lead storyboard artist on 2024’s hit animated film Inside Out 2. The film centers around a girl named Riley who has just turned 13, and the action of the movie mostly takes place in her mind, where we see her emotions (joy, anger, fear, embarrassment, envy, sadness, disgust, and ennui) controlling Riley’s actions from their “headquarters.” Riley begins to experience a new emotion—anxiety—and we watch as the character Anxiety wrestles control of headquarters from the other emotions and drives them to the back of Riley’s mind. The results are chaotic, but the movie is funny, poignant, and relatable.

“I’ve always loved drawing ever since I can remember,” Smythe said. “I was always drawing or painting something, but I didn’t think I could do it as a career until I was at Hutchison and I realized, ‘Oh, I could do children’s books or illustrations for book covers or magazine articles.’ ”

She recalled how Gwen English, one of her art teachers at Hutchison, was an inspiration. “I loved working with her, getting a good foundation for certain ways of working, learning how to use different types of art tools, like watercolor versus pastel, and understanding the discipline of keeping a sketchbook. I learned how to bind my own sketchbooks from her. We would make sketchbooks and then draw in them. I still have some to this day in my office that I saved because I thought they were cool.” 

She added that English also made it clear that art could be a career, whether teaching or working as an illustrator, architect, interior designer, fashion designer, or in some other capacity. “She made me feel that art was a viable career option, whatever I did with it. She was encouraging about that.”

When she was a senior at Hutchison, Smythe had another epiphany. A visitor to her art class from Savannah College of Art and Design mentioned a friend who worked on the animated film Cars. “I thought: ‘People can work on those?’ Then I thought, ‘Oh, he’s an animator. That’s computer stuff. I don’t do that.’ I didn’t realize that people could also draw as part of the process of making a movie. It blew my mind when I realized that once I went to college.”

Shaping Her Story

Smythe attended Washington University in St. Louis where she studied illustration and graphic design. About halfway through college, she discovered storyboarding. “I fell in love with it, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.” 

After college, she did freelance work on educational games and a children’s book, then moved to Los Angeles and started taking classes at the California Institute of the Arts to learn more about storyboarding and filmmaking. 

“Storyboarding and visual development or concept art were the last bastions of actual hand-drawn stuff that you could do in the animation world because so much of it is computerized with 3D animation,” Smythe said. “I love that, but with storyboarding I realized: ‘Oh, I could draw.’ ” She also liked the filmmaking aspect of storyboarding—helping the director and writer shape the story as they went along. “I got excited about the idea of storytelling and drawing together. 

“Being a storyboard artist is more than just drawing a pretty picture. You’re creating a blueprint for the film before anything gets animated,” Smythe explained. “Understanding shots and how to draw things at certain angles, how to draw character expressions, and acting—those are a lot of hats to wear and a lot of things to juggle. Taking some classes to hone those skills was great, so that’s what I did in LA for a couple of years.” 

Soon, she found herself moving north to Emeryville, California, situated between Oakland and Berkeley, to work at Pixar’s headquarters. Her first credit with Pixar was the 22-minute animated film Toy Story That Time Forgot, which was released in 2014. While working on The Good Dinosaur, released in 2015, she met fellow story artist Kelsey Mann, who would later direct Inside Out 2. Smythe’s other credits include Cars 3 (2017), Toy Story 4 (2019), Onward (2020), Luca (2021), and Turning Red (2022).

Making animated films such as “Inside Out 2” is a collaborative project. Smythe and other artists are usually sketching during meetings to try out ideas for characters or scenes.

What does a storyboard artist do exactly? Smythe explained that for any animated film, there are teams of storyboard artists headed up by a person called the head of story. Long before any computer animation is done, the storyboard artists divide up the movie into sequences (a series of connected scenes), which each artist draws. In addition to reviewing script pages, they meet with the director and writer to find out what they are looking for and then start drawing. They may be creating initial sketches to define what a character or scene looks like. Oftentimes, they are starting from scratch and making things up. The sketches are either drawn on paper or on tablet computers, but they are usually done quickly and are kept rough. It might even be as simple as a quick sketch on a post-it note.

“Sometimes we’ll be in the writing room with the writer and the director talking about how they want to solve a problem,” Smythe explained. “As a story artist, I might draw something and say: ‘Like this?’ And if they say ‘no,’ I draw something else and say, ‘Okay, how about this?’ and they might respond, ‘Great! Do that!’ It may just be a chicken scratch drawing, but they get the idea. Then the writer goes off and writes, and we go off and draw, and all meet in the middle. “You get to have this kind of ground level start at taking a stab at what the movie is going to be through your drawings,” Smythe added.

Once scenes have been sketched out, the storyboard artists put their ideas together and pitch them to the director and others, often acting out their ideas to make the story more animated. Smythe said her experiences acting on the stage at Hutchison helped build her confidence to do this part of her job. They then take feedback and revise their sequences. This can go back and forth a few times. Eventually, they give their drawings to an editor who cuts together a temporary reel with music, sound, and voices, even if the voices are temporary.

“We watch it and we judge it, and ask: ‘Is the movie good?’ Usually, it’s not, and we tear it down and start again. It’s a great way to make a movie when you’re working rough and scrappy and trying to make sure it makes sense before you commit to all the work of animation.”


Once Smythe’s work is finished, there are many more steps to completing a movie: digital character models, set design, animation, lighting, recording the actors’ voices, post-production, and much more. Obviously, her drawing skills are paramount, but she said there are many other things to consider as she’s working. 

“I’m always trying to think, what’s the story point?” Smythe explained. “What is the point of this shot? Who is it about? Who’s talking and who’s feeling impacted by this scene? Is this a scene where Sadness is worried about Riley? If so, I’ll focus more on Sadness and draw her a little more. Or is this a scene where the emotions are trying to escape a labyrinth or maze, and I have to make sure that the geography is clear and you understand the location that they’re in so that you don’t get confused. It’s always about, what’s the point of this sequence, what’s the point of this shot, and what’s the theme as well.” 

While at Hutchison, Smythe took a survey of western civilization class that she credits for instilling a love of art history. “I was inspired to learn about all the art that came before us, how artists thought, what these artists were communicating, and how they communicated it,” she recalled. “I still think a lot about historical pieces of art that inspire me when I’m working.” 

Art history also informs the stories of the movies she works on. “For Coco, they did a lot of research on Mexican folk art and culture for the Day of the Dead, and for Onward, we did a lot of research on fantasy as a genre and went to renaissance fairs and researched fantasy art, specifically from the ’70s and ’80s eras,” said Smythe. “Research is a huge aspect of how we make our movies because we want them to have that authenticity. I feel like my love of art history and getting to learn that at Hutchison planted the seed of valuing the research part of making a film.”

“Gwen English made me feel that art was a viable career option, whatever I did with it. She was encouraging about that.”

Collaborating and Contributing

Anxiety is, of course, one of the main characters in Inside Out 2. The character has a wide smile full of teeth, big eyes, and a shock of feather-like hair that stands up straight and trembles with nervous energy. Creating the look of Anxiety’s character was collaborative, Smythe said. “The big eyes and kind of palm tree hair, those were two things I was thinking about, and there were other artists doing the exact same kind of thinking. We started to hone in on Anxiety’s design.”

In drawing the characters for Inside Out 2, Smythe said she often thought about how each emotion in the film made her feel and how to draw that feeling. Anxiety having big eyes made sense since she was scared and worried. She remembered talking to the director about how Anxiety would always be shaking a little bit, which made the featherlike hair vibrate.

“There’s something that feels true about Anxiety, but also a little charming,” Smythe explained. “You think, ‘Oh that feels like anxiety, but I’m not scared of Anxiety. She’s kind of cute in a way.’ We wanted to have the character be relatable as well, especially for kids feeling anxious. I think making Anxiety a little less frightening was a powerful thing to do.”

Smythe said that even though she can be introverted, she loves the collaborative process of these films. “I find it invigorating and fun because I feel like I’m part of a team making this movie magic happen,” she said. She also doesn’t mind working on a project that takes years to finish. Inside Out 2 took approximately four years to complete from start to finish. When they started the movie in 2020, everyone was at home, working via Zoom video calls.

“I like seeing one project evolve over time and being on it for the long haul. I felt passionate about this particular movie and what it was saying about emotions, and I’m happy I got to stay on it for the whole run.”

Louise Smythe presents her storyboard ideas to the team working on the film “Onward.” She said her experiences acting on Hutchison’s stage helped her feel more comfortable making these presentations.

In addition to all her storyboarding work on Inside Out 2, there were a few contributions that Smythe made to the film that she’s particularly proud of. In one sequence, the emotions that Anxiety banished from headquarters are locked in a vault of secrets in Riley’s memories. They encounter another character in the vault named Lance Slashblade, a melodramatic character from a video game that Riley played in her childhood and whom she secretly had a crush on. He is a classic fighting game hero and ultimately helps the emotions escape from the vault. 

Smythe remembered discussing the vault of secrets plot point with Kenna Harris, one of the heads of story on the production. Harris came up with the idea of the video game character, and Smythe created the name Lance Slashblade. “I got so excited, because I remembered when I was 13, there were those kinds of characters that I had a secret crush on and felt embarrassed about because they were animated characters. We had the best time coming up with that and brainstorming together,” she said. 

While she didn’t create the character of Anxiety, Smythe believes she brought a lot of her own experiences with the emotion to discussions. When she was 13 or 14 years old, Smythe moved to Hutchison from Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal School. Even though there were other girls from GSL at Hutchison, she still had anxiety about whether she would have friends and how she would fit in. She also recalled that as a teenager, she began to care more about fashion and boy bands and had crushes on boys and video game characters.

“I feel like I was able to bring a lot of authenticity to the discussion of anxiety and how that felt and how it still feels,” said Smythe. “We all deal with anxiety on some level, but especially at that age, it feels like the biggest thing in the world. It was nice to get to talk with the director about that and share how that made me feel when I was a kid.”

Moving Her Name Up in the Credits

If you’ve ever watched the end credits for an animated film like Inside Out 2, you know that the list of people who work on these kinds of movies is extensive and scrolls on for quite a while. Smythe’s name in the credits was more prominent in this movie because she served as the lead storyboard artist, the first time she’s had that role. As the lead story artist, she was able to participate in more writing and leadership meetings about the movie. Most importantly, though, she was able to continue drawing, which she didn’t want to give up.

“It’s sort of this in-between role,” Smythe said. “I think the first time being in that leadership position was a challenge, because I was trying to figure out being the lead but also working with the director. I didn’t want to overstep if there was a vision the director had. Figuring out that balance was a little tricky at first, and then once I got into the groove, it felt great.”

One of the things that Smythe said she has learned over her career through trial and error is how to manage her time and break her “to-do list” down into manageable chunks.

“When I first started, I would get overwhelmed, because there’s so much I would have to do with a sequence,” she described. “Slowly breaking it down and saying ‘Okay, today I’m going to just sketch the whole thing out really rough. It’s okay if it’s not perfect.’ My worst enemy is a blank page.” She said she once got advice to “start early, start rough, fail fast, fail often.” It came from Andrew Stanton, a writer and director at Pixar who has many credits to his name, most notably as co-writer of the Academy Award nominated screenplay for the original Toy Story.

“I feel like that’s helped me grow a lot as an artist over the years, and that’s what I do all the time. Start early, get it done right away, and then you can always finesse it and have time to go back and make it perfect, make it pretty.”

Working on a movie about emotions was bound to have some personal lessons too. Smythe said that one of the problems they discussed was the ending of Inside Out 2. Would Joy banish Anxiety from headquarters? They decided it didn’t quite feel right because you still feel anxiety as an adult, so there was no way Riley wouldn’t continue to feel anxiety.
 
“It doesn’t go away; it’s about how you manage it. We wanted it to be believable for people watching,” Smythe said. “So, the decision at the end was to have Anxiety stay in headquarters, but she has a little relaxing corner now where she has a massage chair she sits in.”

There was also a lesson about how joy changes when you get older. “Our writer, Dave (Holstein), wrote the line, ‘Maybe this is what happens when you grow up. You feel less joy.’ ” Smythe recalled. “I remember when he wrote that, I was thinking, ‘Wow, a lot of people feel that way.’ I think it’s great to show people you can still connect with your joy even if you’ve been through much, much more difficult things than what Riley went through. What is the importance of joy as you grow up, and what does that look like, and how does joy change as you mature? Those were profound conversations that we had about that emotion and all the emotions.”

Although Smythe can’t reveal the next project she’s working on, one thing is certain: she wants to keep drawing. “I would love to continue being a story lead. I love that role. But no matter what, I just want to keep storyboarding. I mean, that’s my favorite thing. Give me all the sequences. I want to draw them.”
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