Growing up in San Bernardino, California, Sanjay Patel was much more interested in Saturday-morning cartoons than his family’s Hindu traditions. But grudgingly, he would help his dad gather marigold petals for a ceremony called a puja and sit silently beside him in meditation for what seemed like an eternity. “There was very much this culture clash of me wanting to fit in and be “normal,” and my father having this practice and tradition that he wanted to pass on to his family, specifically me,” Patel recalled. “I had no appreciation for it, let alone patience.”   

Now Patel, an animator at Pixar Studios since 1996, has a son of his own. He also has a different perspective on his heritage that he’s chosen to share in Sanjay’s Super Team, the new animated short film he directed that is being paired with the release of  Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur on November 25.

The movie depicts a young boy who uses his imagination to create a trio of Hindu deity-inspired superheroes during a meditation session with his dad. These characters meld Patel’s love of pop culture and cartoons with the Indian tradition and rituals that his dad so desperately wanted him to embrace as a child. It’s a sweet story and the result is also a visual treat, a dazzling mix of color and light.

“It took me a long time to realize that I was just as obsessive and compulsive about cartoons as my dad was about his practice. As I made that connection, it started to help me see things from his point of view and understand that we weren’t that different,” Patel said. “I realized all my dad was asking me to do was stop and get centered, which does not sound nearly as crazy now.”

In the years leading up to the short film, Patel was gradually drawn to the traditions he once rejected. He wrote and illustrated The Little Book of Hindu Deities in 2006, a colorful tome that is essentially a family-friendly retelling of ancient Hindu myths. He followed that up in 2010 with Ramayana: The Divine Loophole, an illustrated version of the epic Indian tale.

But Sanjay’s Super Team was an even greater challenge, perhaps because it hit much closer to home. He made the setting the Lido Motel, a real place that his parents still own, where his family lived and worked during his childhood. The main characters he crafted were undeniably based on himself and his dad. This led to a moment of panic. “I felt like I worked very hard to fit in, and now opening up this very personal, unfamiliar side to all my colleagues at Pixar, not to mention the rest of the world, just felt extremely vulnerable.”

Luckily, he received similar encouragement from two seemingly different mentors. One was his dad, who viewed it as bad karma not to give the project his all. “He said whether you get success or failure, that doesn’t matter, all that matters is that you try your best. He gave me that piece of advice and I heard it.”

The other nudge came from Pixar Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter who encouraged him to just tell the truth about himself and his dad. “He said ‘Do it. People will understand,’” Patel recalled.

Perhaps the most highly anticipated moment for Patel came when he showed the film to his father, who said he had not seen a movie in a theater since The Sound of Music in 1965. When his normally stoic dad teared up, everyone else at the private Pixar screening did too, recalled producer Nicole Paradis Grindle. “His father had done all this work so that Sanjay could have this experience and see this success. As a parent you realize how you can be completely overwhelmed by how much you want your children to be happy and succeed. I could feel that coming off of him and it was so beautiful and emotional.”

Seeing his own story come alive on the screen has influenced Patel as well. “I couldn’t appreciate this when I was six or seven, so it’s neat that different things become available to me, different insights,” Patel said. “I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to wake up to something that’s so important to my family.”

These days, Patel finds himself developing his own rituals and forms of meditation, whether he’s at his desk getting lost in creating an illustration, or at home putting his two-year-old son to bed. “When he’s in my arms and I get 20 minutes of holding my kid in the darkness while he falls asleep, it really feels meditative and awesome. It’s the best.”