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How John Lasseter Built Pixar From Early Days to Now - Business Insider
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John Lasseter might not be a household name on the level of Walt Disney, but he's certainly just as important in the animation world.
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The man with an affinity for movie-themed Hawaiian shirts has been the chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios since Disney purchased Pixar in 2006.
No studio can match the creativity, heart, and cleverness found in all Pixar films, and it seems those principles can be traced back to Lasseter (No. 36 on the BI 100: The Creators).
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"You want the movies to touch people," Lasseter said in an interview for Pixar's 30th anniversary this year. "Make 'em funny, make 'em beautiful, make 'em scary, but in the end you want that heart of the movie to be so strong."
Lasseter's and Pixar's success are linked. He cofounded the animation studio that has now made nearly $10 billion worldwide. He championed computer animation at a time when the technology was still quite infantile. He created and directed "Toy Story," which started it all (more than 250 computer-animated films have been made since). He kept asking questions that resulted in better animation all around and better Pixar films.
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Take a look at how John Lasseter came to be the creative mind he is and how he helped to create the Pixar empire.
John Lasseter was born in Hollywood, California, on January 12, 1957. At the age of five, he won his very first award — $15 from the Model Grocery Market in Whittier, California, for a crayon drawing of the Headless Horseman.
He was the second student to be accepted into the newly formed Character Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1975. Tim Burton was the third student.
While at CalArts, he made two animated shorts, "Lady and the Lamp" and "Nitemare," which both won him the Student Academy Award for Animation. He is the only two-time winner of the award.
After graduation, Lasseter and several of his classmates were hired at Walt Disney Feature Animation, but the new class of animators didn't mesh well with the old one. They were put to work on "The Fox and the Hound," but most didn't stay long.
Lasseter said: "We were so on fire and constantly giving suggestions. It was all constructive, but the people running animation seemed to resent us. One of the directors told me, 'You put in your time for 20 years and do what you're told, and then you can be in charge.' I didn't realize it then, but I was beginning to be perceived as a loose cannon. All I was trying to do was make things great, but I was beginning to make some enemies."
Already influenced by "Star Wars," Lasseter found even greater influence in "Tron" and its ability to add dimension to animation. It inspired him to try the method with "The Brave Little Toaster." But he stepped on too many toes in the process, and his zeal ultimately got him fired from Disney.
He attended a computer graphics conference in 1983, where he talked with Ed Catmull, the head of the computer division at Lucasfilm. Later that day, Catmull recruited Lasseter to work on the short film "The Adventures of André & Wally B."
In 1984, Lasseter was hired full time at Lucasfilm as an interface designer. Also "The Adventures of André & Wally B." premiered at SIGGRAPH, a special interest group on computer graphics.
Pixar says the short featured "groundbreaking technology such as complex flexible characters, hand-painted textures, and motion blur."
Source: Pixar
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In 1986, Steve Jobs purchased the computer division at Lucasfilm and created the independent Pixar. In the same year, Lasseter became Pixar's first animator and completed his directorial debut, "Luxo Jr." (The idea came after he played around with creating a digital model of his Luxo desk lamp.) It was the first CGI film nominated for an Academy Award — best animated short — and it established Pixar's mascot: Luxo Jr.
From the beginning, Lasseter knew he wouldn't be able to compete with the computer programmers and their knowledge of the hardware. Instead, he opted to work alongside them because they didn't know what he knew, "and that was how to bring a character to life and give it emotion and personality through pure movement."
Two years later, Lasseter's work won an Academy Award when "Tin Toy" took home the Oscar for best animated short film —the first time a computer-animated film won an Oscar.
Pixar and Lasseter carried over the toy-centric plot of "Tin Toy" into the studio's first feature-length film, "Toy Story," which is also the first-ever computer-animated feature film.
Source: Pixar
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Lasseter's "Toy Story" team felt ambition and challenge in the air because at the time, the computer-animation industry didn't really exist. "Many people rejected it and did not think it was possible," said Kelly Asbury, "Toy Story" story artist.
The challenges brought out the qualities in Lasseter that got him fired from Disney years before. "I was so geeky and into this stuff," he said. "I'd always say, 'Hey can we do this?' They’d say, 'No, but let's try,' and they'd do R&D to get there. Meanwhile, all that R&D is inspiring different ideas. Then I'd say, 'Oh, can we do this with it?' and come up with ideas we'd never thought of."
"Toy Story" became the highest-grossing film of 1995, making nearly $192 million domestically, and it earned Lasseter a Special Achievement Academy Award.
Lasseter went on to create and direct the feature-length animated films "A Bug's Life" (1998), "Toy Story 2" (1999), "Cars" (2006), and "Cars 2" (2011). He also executive-produced all Pixar features since "Monsters, Inc." (2001) — that's about 70 feature films and shorts.
In 2006, Disney bought Pixar and named Lasseter chief creative officer of both animated studios. He was also named principal creative adviser at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he helps design attractions for Disney Parks.
Walt Disney Studios went from making underperforming films like "Home on the Range" and "Treasure Planet" to big successes like "The Princess and the Frog" and "Wreck-It Ralph."
In the same year he was promoted, Lasseter announced that Disney would once again produce short cartoons to put the company back at the forefront of the form it pioneered.
Nowadays, we have the "Frozen Fever" short before "Cinderella," "Lava" before "Inside Out," and "Feast" before "Big Hero 6."
In 2010, he was honored with the Producers Guild of America David O. Selznick Achievement Award in Motion Pictures "in recognition of an outstanding body of work." Lasseter was the first producer of animated films to be given the award.
Source: Producers Guild of America
Lasseter finally became a part of one of his films in 2011, when he was included in "Cars 2" as John Lassetire.
In 2012, Cars Land launched in Disney California Adventure Park. Lasseter was instrumental in bringing the characters and settings of Radiator Springs to life in this expansion.
When Comcast bought DreamWorks Animation earlier this year, its chairman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group said: "The model that we're trying to use is John Lasseter."