Pete Docter

Pete Docter is Pixar's not-so-secret weapon. He's been with the studio since the day after he graduated from college. Literally. He snagged his diploma one day, and reported for duty at Pixar the following morning at the age of twenty-one (Source).

He helped created the stories for the first two Toy Story flicks, Monsters, Inc., and WALL-E, and as supervising animator on Toy Story, he modeled Buzz Lightyear's mug after his own, making faces at his desk (Source). Docter went on to write and direct two of Pixar's most poignant comedies: Up and Inside Out, both of which earned him Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature.

Inside Out presented Docter with the mind-bending challenge of making abstract ideas into not just visual representations, but simultaneously hilarious and heartwarming visual representations:

It was a lot of working and reworking; a lot of stuff that you see on the screen is maybe the 50th attempt at it. We do a lot of writing but we also draw the whole thing, almost like a comic book. We film that, put our own dialogue to it with music and sound-effects and create kind of an approximation of what the movie would look like if we made that. Then we ask the crew, kitchen staff, everyone to watch it and react to the film; some things work and get a good reaction or laugh, and other things fail miserably, and we take the things that work and try to make it better. We do this process again and again… (Source)

See? Your English teachers were right: Even Pixar directors with a pair of Oscars on the shelf brainstorm, write, and revise—and then do it all over again. And again. And again. And—well, you get the point.