"During moviemaking sometimes, you find characters that really stand out and become this happy surprise in the story, and Scrat was one of them." "Scrat was one of the characters that we developed for ice age 1." "And it came from a need to find an opening sequence for the movie." "So, we went through Peter's drawings, and there it was." "We added the saber-teeth and we gave him an acorn, and this whole issue was born." "And that's when the idea of that glacier sequence became the opening of the movie." "Very simple storyline, no dialogue." "Just having this little character run for his life with one thing in mind, the nut." "People just loved it." "Everybody who saw this sequence just could so identify with this poor little guy, that he just got a life of his own, and we just ended up using him throughout all three movies." "Scrat sequences are a dream, in a way, because it is pure animation, just to have fun and do slapstick and not be tied down by dialogue." "But after three movies, it does get challenging because..." ""So, okay, what have we not done with this guy?"" "The most important thing in Scrat's universe is his acorn." "That's all he cares about." "And writers came up with something brilliant by coming up with the one thing that could possibly compete with that, and that's Scratte." "Scratte is the perfect foil because she's beautiful, she's cunning, she's everything that he isn't." "When I was designing Scratte, I knew she had to be the opposite of Scrat." "So she had to be beautiful." "She had to be smart." "All the things that he's not." "Scrat is this nervous, twitchy character, not particularly well-groomed." "She's elegant and smooth." "We just wanted her to look as beautiful as she could be, because Scrat has to look at her and just fall in love immediately." "So, we gave her long eyelashes with a little bit of blue, so we just make her really feminine and funny." "Scratte did start out being a lot more instinctual, and then we started seeing her look, playing against Scrat actually worked a lot better." "And that's where it started to mold her personality." "Her movement is really different because she's very straight with her poses." "Scrat will pop and just jerk into the motion." "She'll do a swirl." "The uglier and the more disheveled and pathetic you get Scrat, the funnier he is." "But you always have to make sure she's looking as good as possible, and that's where the comedy is, the contrast between the two." "And we kind of thought, what if both Scrat and Scratte have the same goal, the nut." "Like, we can create this great fun little kind of spy vs spy kind of thing that they keep trying to outsmart each other to catch the nut." "And then, therefore by doing that, they find love." "Then, the concept came up, the love triangle," "Scrat, nut and girl, Scratte." "The Scrat sequences in general are not scripted." "They are all invented in story and with the director." "Carlos definitely had the idea of the Scrat arc, meeting the girl and a basic idea of what would happen." "But as far as every individual sequence, they leave it to us." "The first thing we do is a first rough pass." "Rough, dirty awful looking drawings, and then you pitch them in front of the whole room." "You act it out." "You do voices." "You're really trying to get the room to laugh." "And then falls like a rock." "The Scrat tango sequence, that was my assignment." "And I thought, "well, okay." "They need to be fighting over the nut." ""It's gotta be fun and funny and..."" "So, then, the next part was me just trying to sketch out the choreography, seeing how it would work with their tails, and bringing squirrelness into a human dance." "Just weeks of just doing gags." "And then Carlos basically just picks his favorite, and the tango was born." "The tango sequence took 33 days, about five weeks, because there was a lot of play between who is holding the nut, where it's going, so it takes a great deal of Polish time." "We looked up on YouTube how to dance tango, and I think one of the coolest responses was when the storyboard artists noticed" "I did a backwards ocho in one of the shots I did." "So, actually, I have very specific tango moves in this." "So, it's all a collaborative effort that made that sequence extremely painful but extremely rewarding at the same time." "It's one of my favorite sequences in the movie." "It just shows how fun and painful love can be." "One thing about the original Scrat was thinking," ""what's gonna be the voice for Scrat?"" "So, we just put temporary voices just to see." "We needed some sounds." "So, I connected with my inner Scrat, and the noises just came voluntarily." "Mostly, it's effort sounds." "Scrat gets surprised by something, it's kind of..." "He's getting bopped on the head, it's kind of the same sound, only just..." "Things like that." "It matched so perfectly." "We said, "why look elsewhere?" "We got the talent right here."" "And Chris became the signature voice of Scrat and was wonderful." "And then when we defined the Scrat girl," "I decided, "let's look inside again." ""Let's go through the same process."" "And Karen Disher, she'd been doing a lot of voice temps for us." "I've been doing scratch voices since I started out." "So, I think when they needed a temp voice for Scratte at the beginning of production, they were like, "we'll just bring Karen in,"" "which is, for me, a lot of fun, when you can come into the booth and they're like," ""okay, you're falling down a cliff."" "You know, "you're being punched in the stomach."" "You know, it's a funny and weird thing." "In terms of vocalizing, it's tricky because Scrat's so great." "Chris wedge does such an amazing voice." "So, how do I keep this animal in the same family, but different at the same time?" "So, for me, that was thinking of little sexy things like, little purrs she could do, little come-hither squeaks, which is difficult to do." "There's big, furry paws to fill in a lot of ways." "Pretty clever." "I don't know where she gets it." "I just don't." "I was not expecting to end up being the voice in a movie at all." "And then John came to me about a year and a half ago now and said," ""guess what?" "You're gonna be Scratte."" "And I was just, like, "shut up."" "Like, I couldn't even believe it, so..." "It was really exciting." "Mmm!" "The final ending where you kind of, you keep the question," ""is he gonna be with the girl?" "Or is he gonna get the nut?" ""Or he's gonna get nothing?"" "And we had, like, three different ways of ending the movie." "And we chose one that we thought was the best for Scrat." "The nut always comes first for Scrat." "Always, always, always." "He can't win at the end, never." "And that's the cardinal rule 'cause that's the Scrat." "We kind of leave Scrat where we pick him up in the beginning." "He's always gonna have a certain amount of struggle in his life no matter what happens."