Dan Gerson

Gerson described writing his first film, Monsters, Inc., as a highly collaborative process: "I would sit with Pete [Docter] and David Silverman [the directors], and we would talk about a scene and they would tell me what they were looking for. I would make some suggestions and then go off and write the sequence. We'd get together again and review it and then hand it off to a story artist. Here's where the collaborative process really kicked in. The board artist was not beholden to my work and could take liberties here and there. Sometimes, I would suggest an idea about making the joke work better visually. Once the scene moved on to animation, the animators would plus the material even further." Andrew Stanton credited him as having rewritten and improved Monsters, Inc. after he was unable to continue with the project: "I’ve never written anything that I felt was [not improvable], and Dan Gerson was the guy who came in after I left and kept running with it."

We wanted to try and do a movie in which Mike is our main character and we've had a lot of challenges with this being a prequel. We have never written a prequel, and in fact when we looked at the prequels that are out there, there weren’t that many, and the ones that exist aren't great....how do we get people to come along on this journey even though they know where we're ending up? Can we get people to invest in his wants and desires and...almost cause the audience to forget a little bit about where we're ending up … If we’ve done our job, the audience will get so invested it’s still going to be something of a surprise.

Gerson died in Los Angeles at the age of 49 on February 6, 2016, due to brain cancer. He was working on Cars 3 at the time of his death. The film was completed by several screenwriters and was dedicated to his memory.

Gerson contributed material to Chicken Little, Curious George, Cars, Meet the Robinsons, Up, Inside Out and Zootopia, as well as television shows including Misguided Angeles, Big Wolf on Campus and Something So Right. Big Hero 6 won the Academy Award for best animated film and was also the highest-grossing animated film of 2014. He also won a BAFTA award.

Roy Conli, who produced Big Hero 6, described his and Baird's approach to writing the film as being "to find that line that was emotional and not damaging." Outside scriptwriting, Gerson advised Pixar president Edwin Catmull on structuring his 2014 autobiography.

Gerson grew up in New York on the Upper West Side and attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School before studying at Cornell University, where he was a member of the Sigma Pi fraternity. He then studied for an MFA at NYU and wrote for NBC before joining Pixar in 1999. He married Beau Stacom, with whom he had two children.

Daniel Gerson (August 1, 1966 – February 6, 2016) was an American screenwriter and voice actor, best known for his work with Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios. He co-wrote the screenplays of Monsters, Inc., Monsters University and Big Hero 6, which was reported to be his last film as screenwriter.