In the 14 years since, the Hong Kong-born and raised Lin - now the studio's director of camera photography - has planned and framed thousands of eye-popping shots in such blockbuster hits as Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, Up and, most recently, Cars 2. Also during that time, the studio became a part of Disney; it now employs 1,300 people at its Emeryville, California, headquarters.

Lin says that while bigger and nominally corporatised, Pixar still retains a unique creative culture under the 'chaos management' style of president Ed Catmull, the computer scientist who developed the studio's rendering software that continues to set industry standards.

'We have a saying at the studio: art challenges technology and technology inspires art,' Lin says. 'In any production, we rally around a good story to discover its needs, and the technology usually rises to the challenge.'

Lin's responsibilities as director of photography on a film begin with research, months ahead of production. The goal is to look for inspiration everywhere - in films and in the real world - to develop a visual language for the story. Research for Up included a visit to Angel Falls in Venezuela, and for Cars 2 Lin and his team went to a Nascar race and spent time in the ESPN booth.

During the layout process - where virtual shots are framed to the beat of the story in a back-and-forth process with the director and story supervisor - for Up, Lin developed a system correlating shapes with emotions. On one end, he used a square (such as the shape of Up protagonist Carl Fredricksen's face) to represent sadness and heaviness, on the other, the circle (fellow character Russell's round face) for happiness. He used this spectrum in composition, still and moving shots throughout the film, and credits director Pete Docter for his ability to embrace that vision and keep the working process free flowing.

For Cars 2, the emotional framework Lin assigned was the contrasting 'masculinity' and 'femininity' of scenes. 'Mapping a film's language is like looking for a light switch in the dark. You have an idea where the switch might be, but you're basically searching and grasping for clues. Once you find it and flip it, figuratively, it lights up the whole story.

'[At Pixar] we make films we want to see, that address issues an adult will face. When you think about it, Finding Nemo is about a father's angst about over-protecting his children. Toy Story 2 is really about death and cherishing the time you have - very adult themes. Whatever the technology or medium, the essential truth doesn't change - you have to have a good story,' Lin says.

With his personal trip last week coinciding with the Hong Kong release of Cars 2, Lin told the story of a star-struck tween who grew up to helm some of the most exciting, and lucrative, animation projects to hit the big screens in the past decade.

'I was 12 in 1977, the year Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out. After I saw them, I read whatever I could find on Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and their experiences in film school. And it just clicked - I could actually study filmmaking.'

When the California College of Art in San Francisco accepted him, Lin didn't hesitate. 'While San Francisco didn't have the number and scale of productions that Los Angeles did, the great thing about it was that Lucas Films was there, so there were a lot of special effects houses that catered to it.'

Still, jobs were scarce when Lin graduated in 1989. To make ends meet, he worked at a print and copy shop while fielding the odd freelance job with news crews, documentary and commercial projects. 'I would get maybe one project a year; it wasn't easy living off that.'

At the end of five lean years, Lin landed his first full-time film job with Midland Productions, a special effects company in the Bay Area specialising in ride films - the kind one sees on simulation rides. A four-minute film would typically take five months to shoot - including set and model building ('this was still the pre-CG era'), rigging camera cranes and tracks. 'I became a camera operator after a couple of years - which meant I got good at computer programming for the motion control camera ... But it was pretty dull stuff.'

As often with career changers, Lin's break came down to a chance meeting on the last film he did with Midland: for an Imax production, the company brought in an animator from Skellington Productions, who had just finished working on Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. Through the animator's recommendation, Lin landed the job on James and the Giant Peach, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Asked whether he has ever been tempted to work on live-action films, Lin is quick to rattle off the names of animation directors he's worked with who have forayed into that territory - Henry Selik (James and the Giant Peach), Brad Bird (The Incredibles), Andrew Stanton (Wall-E) - but doesn't see himself among them.

'Personally, I love computer animation. I like the freedom and 100 per cent control. There are no physical constraints in the world of animation. In live action, when the lights go out you have to pack up. Me, I can keep working as long as I like; I can make things exactly the way I want.'