In true family fashion, she started by bringing her mom in on the project Chinese dumplings were supposed to look like. Her dad is from the north of China, where dumplings were invented, so she learned how to make them. "I used my mom's hands in the movie," she laughed.

Animation gives the director tremendous creative leeway. The characters and sets aren't real, so the director can change, morph, add and subtract anything he or she wants to change the tone, the story or the focus of their work.

For instance, Shi said, "The father doesn't appear much in the movie, but when he pushes the son into the Mom's bedroom while she's grief-stricken, it's his way of showing love for his family."

Shi demonstrates an apt instinct for how to focus attention on what matters: the mother's rich play of emotion as she "raises" her dumpling son and her shocking reaction to his decision to leave home with a bodacious blonde.

"I wanted the shock value of the reveal at the end－of how the mother's fantasy enabled her to process her son's decision to move away."

Now, with the success of Bao, Shi is on the fast track to animation stardom with a feature of her own in the Pixar pipeline.

The fact that she is able to show the universality of Chinese culture and family relations without sacrificing its uniqueness is a big part of what should make her upcoming feature something worth waiting for.