Fellow animator Domee Shi has enjoyed a similar career evolution in roughly the last five years. While Shi, who directed Pixar’s breakout short Bao, started at the animation company in 2011, her prospects began exploding in 2014, when she first came up with the adorable dumpling character of Bao. In 2015, the same year Shi’s first official Pixar credit, Inside Out, debuted, she pitched the fully fleshed out Bao idea to Pixar executives when the company held an open call for internal ideas for its next theatrical short. “It felt kind of like American Idol in that there were different rounds, panels of judges, you had like five minutes to pitch each idea,” Shi recalled over the phone. “[It had] everything except for the cameras.”