From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com, my guest, director, Jennifer Young Nelson, has worked in animation that has a lot of explosive dramatic surprise in it.

She won an Emmy for a work on Top McFarland's Spawn.

Well, make sure we get his name in there.

She also worked as head of story on the first Kung Fu Panda and is now directing Kung Fu Panda too.

Jennifer, thanks so much for being here.

Oh, thank you.

Before we get into Kung Fu Panda, I know you also worked as a storyboard artist on Dark City

with an incredible designer, Patrick Tutopoulos.

And there's a flairful design in your work as well.

And I wonder how much of that created a kinship with Patrick,

because that's such an interesting world in that movie. Oh, yes.

He was just such amazing artist.

He's just so amazing.

He just showed up, had these giant rolls of paper, and it would just make these gorgeous marker paintings out of scratch.

And I've learned a lot off him just watching him use his, basically he uses his marker

colors like dyes and just puts it on a big piece of Kleenex and just wipes it all over the

paper and treats in a very painterly layered way. And I loved watching him because I have a

background in illustration. And I was doing illustration on Dark City

and sitting there, and he came in and just showed me how to do it right. It was just really cool.

Well, his design work, especially that kind of used of smearing color, especially with the reds and the blues kind of

really pop out of the work. I see some of that in the design of Kung Fu Panditeer. Oh, I didn't do a lot of the visual

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