-By Sarah Sluis

As the founder and CEO of Illumination Entertainment, Chris Meledandri guides a movie from concept to final product, while handling everything from creative to budgetary concerns. It’s no wonder that one of his favorite tasks involves finding talented people to do the job. Far from being an egoist intent on putting his personal stamp on a project, Meledandri says that his biggest contribution is choosing good people. A delegator, as good executives should be, he cites “the ability to identify and then support artistic talent” as his biggest strength.

Meledandri served as the head of Fox Animation for eight years, shepherding movies such as Ice Age and Robots to cinemas before setting up Illumination, a family entertainment division of Universal, in 2007. Meledandri serves as producer on the first of Illumination’s productions, Despicable Me.

For Illumination, finding good animators involves searching outside of its Burbank backyard. Instead of doing the animation in-house, Illumination subscribes to an “all-shore” model. Taking advantage of the “explosion of talent” in the field, Meledandri can “cast” the animators for each project. Despicable Me, for example, was animated by a French company, but the upcoming stop-motion animated version of The Addams Family will rely on a company equipped for that medium.

The luxury of flexibility, in Meledandri’s view, is a new one. “When I started in 1998 making CG films, the only way you could do it is if you wholly owned a studio.” While head of Fox Animation, he purchased Blue Sky Animation for Fox. “I had responsibility over them 365 days of the year, year in and year out,” he says, sounding happy he no longer has to deal with the nuts and bolts of running an animation company.

Relying on global animation talent also allows Meledandri to work outside the competitive animation environment in Hollywood. “If, as a new company, I had decided to produce Despicable Me in Los Angeles or in California, I would not have had the access to the consistency of talent that I’ve had on this film, because there are so many other companies competing for that talent. So for us, the way in which we would get world-class talent was actually, as crazy as it may seem, to go to Paris. France has a wonderful tradition of animation, but they don’t have seven major companies competing for that talent.”

While the 3D explosion has only hit theatres in the past year, Meledandri had the foresight to plan for the extra dimension from the beginning. “It was very clear two years ago that there was a momentum behind 3D that would result in enough screen penetration to make it worth the cost of time and money to produce Despicable Me in full stereoscopic 3D.”

He explains that unlike in live action, “3D is a very natural extension of the CG animation process. We are already conceiving of the film in dimensional space.” Once animators reach the layout phase, “where you’re setting your shots, placing the camera, if you will,” the filmmakers start to add in 3D.
Meledandri won’t say for sure whether all his future releases will be in 3D. “Right now, all the films that we’re working on in CG are being conceived as 3D movies. The live-action movies, we’re taking on a case-by-case basis.”

Illumination has a mix of live-action and animated movies in production. After Despicable Me, the company has an Easter 2011 release date set for Hop, which follows a man (Russell Brand) who must fill in for the Easter Bunny after he runs over him in a car. An animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax is in the works for 2012. Tim Burton is on board to direct and produce a stop-motion animation version of The Addams Family, and other projects, such as a live-action adaptation of Where’s Waldo?, are also in the works.

Meledandri seems to return to talent he likes again and again. Steve Carell voiced the lead in Horton Hears a Who! over at Fox Animation and now plays the villain in Despicable Me. Brand appears in Despicable Me and will star in Hop. Meledandri also has a fondness for screenwriters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, with whom he has set up multiple projects. Soon after creating Illumination Entertainment, he turned to the writers for Despicable Me.
“Cinco and Ken were the first writers that I thought of, not only because I thought they would be uniquely suited for the idea, but also because I was extremely interested in continuing our collaboration with them.”

Meledandri values their focus on character, which is also consistent with Illumination’s mission. “The heart of what we do is tell stories about characters. Character is the most important part of our filmmaking and storytelling process, and they approach everything through character.”

He also admits that there’s some level of personal taste involved. “I just really like what they write, and I think if you boil everything down, it’s just that.”
Meledandri has tapped the duo for at least two more productions, Hop and The Lorax, which the duo will write and direct.

For now, Meledandri is focusing on marketing Despicable Me and making final decisions about the number of screens in its release. “We’re barreling forward,” he says, with the confidence of a seasoned executive with “extremely gifted, creative voices” supporting him.