Animation Infinity and Well Beyond

John Lasseter’s house may not be the only one with two Oscars sitting on the mantel, but it surely is the only one where both statues are exquisitely well-dressed.

“Oscar looks best in off-the-shoulder,” the 42-year-old Lasseter puckishly says as he carefully adjusts one of the two sets of wigs and costumes (one for Christmas, the other for Oscar night) his statues have. “I was thinking of starting a side business in Oscar clothing, but it’s a limited market.”

Lasseter’s day job, being what Time magazine calls “The Wizard of Pixar,” certainly keeps him busy. He’s vice president of the Northern California-based Pixar, and he’s been involved in computer animation for 15 years. In addition to the films he won those Oscars for (“Toy Story” and the short “Tin Toy”), he’s been the key creative force behind both “A Bug’s Life” and “Toy Story 2,” the “Toy Story” sequel that’s already taken in more than $150 million.

Smart, playful and warm, he calls Pixar’s sensibility “a blend of Monty Python, Frank Capra, Walt Disney and Chuck Jones” and seems eager to go wherever the expanding world of computer animation is heading.

*

Question: What’s exciting to you about what you do?

Answer: What I love doing is animating inanimate objects, giving them personality by really studying their particular purpose. If this object was alive, the purpose it was manufactured for would be the thing it would want to do more than anything else in the world. A glass, for instance, is manufactured to hold liquid. I always thought, well, it wants to be full, it wants to hold liquid more than anything else in the world. So the more you drink from it, the madder it gets at you, and the most depressed thing in the world is an empty glass. That’s the philosophy we work from. I call it the integrity of the object.

*

Q: How do you manage to make films that are both smart and entertain such a wide audience?

A: We’re always trying to do things differently, taking something you’re familiar with but juxtaposing it in a way you’ve never seen before. And we’re also trying to give it some depth. I think the depth of the emotion and even of the humor is where you truly grab the adult audience, where you find this true connection. I’ve watched so many films that have either a formula or a cliche quality to them. They think, “If you do this, this and this, you’ll make the audience cry.” But that’s not the case. You need to move them, you need to touch them individually, and then it will happen.

I had a design teacher when I was at CalArts, Bill Moore, who said something to me in class I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Don’t insult your audience.” When we get into a story, I’ve always believed in that. I think audiences across all age groups are very, very smart, and we never talk down to them. And we don’t dumb it down for kids. Kids get it, you know, and sometimes kids get things quicker than adults.

*

Q: Your films also manage to have a lot of warmth without being sappy.

A: That’s really important to me. There’s a strong difference between the definitions of “charming” and “cute.” To me, “charming” is “cute” with substance. In animation I’ve always liked to give things warmth, to make it as real as possible and relate to people without resorting to the classic cute eyeballs kind of thing.

*

Q: How did “Toy Story 2” come about? Wasn’t it going to go straight to video at one point?

A: Disney 1/8which distributes Pixar’s films 3/8 has a business model: When an animated feature makes a lot of money, you follow it up with a direct-to-video. In my mind, the only reason to do a sequel is if you can come up with a good story.

When we looked at toys, we decided that what a toy wants to do more than anything else, what drives it deep down in its soul, is to be played with by a child and to give a child happiness. So probably the most tragic thing that can happen to a toy is to be outgrown, which is something we never dealt with in the first one. This idea had so much potential emotion in it that doing a sequel made sense.

*

Q: Now that you and Pixar have had three hits in a row, does this put more pressure on you?

A: It was really nice during the first “Toy Story” to be just quietly working in this nondescript office building in Richmond making this movie, because even within Disney no one really quite knew what it was about. Even though we worked on “Toy Story” for four years . . . when it came out it caught everybody by surprise.

But though the success adds a little pressure, one of the nice things about Pixar is that we give ourselves more pressure than any outside forces. We’re so hard on ourselves that we spend about two years just working and reworking the story. Animation’s so expensive, you can’t afford to do coverage, there’s no editing in post-production. . . . Our rule is it has to play right in story reels, it has give you the humor, the action, the heart, all the things that are important to us. Because what I’ve found in the past is that if it’s not working and we say, “Go ahead, it’ll get saved once it gets in animation,” it never gets saved.

*

Q: What films have inspired you?

A: A few things have happened in my life that have driven me to do what I do, and seeing “Star Wars” at the Chinese 1/8Theatre 3/8 the first week it came out was one of them. What the movie did to an audience, just the frenzy and the pure, utter entertainment, I’d never seen before. At that moment I really did say, “Animation can do this to an audience. There’s no reason animation can’t entertain audiences at this level.” And as we make these films, I think of the audience every single day.

*

Q: Seeing the first computer-animated segments of “Tron” while you worked at Disney had a major impact on you. What did you find inspirational?

A: Two friends showed it to me on a Moviola, it was really early stuff. What excited me was not the images. It was that for the first time there was a dimensionality to them. There were shadows, there was shading, you could move a camera in and around objects with the kind of control that was incredible. At the Disney studio, Walt had always strived to get more dimension in animation with a multi-point camera; he wanted a little bit more depth. When I saw this, I immediately said, “This is it, this is the tool we’ve been looking for.”

*

Q: What are your thoughts on the future of computer-generated imagery, or CGI?

A: To me, CGI is a complete misnomer, because the computers are just the tools. People generated the imagery using computers. Word processors don’t write for you, but people assume the computers do a lot more than they really do. The exciting thing I’m looking forward to is getting this incredible medium into the hands of a lot of other filmmakers, because to me computer animation is like the Panavision camera. You put it in the hands of a great director and a great cinematographer and you’re going to get something completely different than another director and cinematographer.

What I’m looking forward to is the growth of this medium from a novelty to an everyday art form. In the early days, people were amazed not for the quality of the images but the fact that they were made with a computer. That was the big thing--”Wow, that’s made with a computer, look at that, it’s amazing.” Then you’d look at it and go, “Yeah, but it’s ugly.”

I’ve always looked forward to the day that it would be judged by the same criteria that live-action films were. I don’t want to be in a special category, I want people to go into a theater, see a movie, and it’s like, does it entertain the audience, does it thrill them, do they walk out going, “Wow, that was a great movie”? Instead of “Wow, that was great computer animation”? That’s not what I want to hear.

*

Q: “Toy Story 2” is being shown digitally in a few theaters, including the El Capitan in Hollywood. What kind of difference does digital make?

A: One of the frustrating things for me has always been that once we put something on film, it never quite looks the same, the theatrical releases are never 100% of what we saw on the high-resolution monitors we use at Pixar. Just six months ago I saw a demonstration of this new Texas Instruments digital projector, and the clarity of it was astounding to me. With “Toy Story 2,” it’s unbelievable how much better it looks.

*

Q: Are we looking at a time when everything is going to be released digitally?

A: There’s no question to me that this is the future. The reason is there will never be a scratch on the print, there will never be a hair wiggling up from the bottom of the frame, there will never be out of frame and out of focus. . . . I want to know that someone in Iowa will be seeing the film a month after it’s released in as beautiful and as clear a print as the day it was released.

*

Q: What are the advantages of living in Northern California?

A: It wasn’t a choice to say, “I’m going to live in Northern California to be away from Hollywood.” I’m born and raised in Los Angeles, Whittier actually, I love Los Angeles. But when my wife and I moved up here, I found that people tended to be a little more who they are. . . . Sonoma is a small town, and it keeps me kind of grounded. One of the things I cherish, frankly, is it keeps me in touch with the audience who I make these movies for.