 The film 's art design is intended to reflect 1950s Broadway musicals . Docter imagined that with emotions for characters , they could " push the level of caricature both in the design and in the style of movement to degrees [ they 'd ] never done before . " To this end , they emulated animators Tex Avery and Chuck Jones . Docter informed supervising animators Shawn Krause and Victor Navone to push the graphic caricature of each character rather than sticking to the rigid behavior of each RenderMan model . This required an artist to draw over characters in the film during dailies , using a Wacom Cintiq . One of the first scenes the team worked on was the dinnertime scene , in which viewers rapidly switch between the real world and Headquarters inside the family 's minds . 
