John Lasseter
John Lasseter is a producer, born 1957.
Lasseter's first job in animation was at Disney. He left for the computer division at Lucasfilm, which was spun out as Pixar in 1986, and spent the rest of the decade proving in four short films that a machine could carry a performance. Luxo Jr. is two desk lamps and ninety seconds. Tin Toy won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Both are arguments dressed up as toys, and the argument was that character animation, not surface rendering, was the point of the technology.
Toy Story followed in 1995 and brought him a Special Achievement Oscar. What he was actually good at was structural: he built films around objects that exist to be used and are terrified of being outgrown, which gave a technology demonstration a real emotional engine. A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2 kept the same discipline. As chief creative officer of Pixar and later of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Disneytoon Studios, he ran story reviews across both houses, and the Disney features of that era carry his fingerprints even where his name is nowhere near the direction.
Cars is where the criticism starts, and it is fair. The 2006 original and Cars 2 are the most merchandise-shaped things he made, and the Mater shorts that spun off them are exactly what they look like. He also served as principal creative advisor to Walt Disney Imagineering. He holds none of those posts now. Since 2019 he has been head of animation at Skydance Animation.
Movies (27)
- Toy Story (1995)
- Toy Story 2 (1999)
- Toy Story 2 (1999)
- Cars (2006)
- Cars (2006)
- Cars 2 (2011)
- A Bug's Life (1998)
- A Bug's Life (1998)
- Cars Toon Mater's Tall Tales (2008)
- Mater and the Ghostlight (2006)
- The Pixar Story (2007)
- Tokyo Mater (2008)
- Beyond Infinity: Buzz and the Journey to Lightyear (2022)
- Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019)
- Luxo Jr. (1986)
- Toy Story at 20: To Infinity and Beyond (2015)
- Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009)
- Unidentified Flying Mater (2009)
- These Amazing Shadows (2011)
- Tin Toy (1988)
- A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman (2015)
- Red's Dream (1987)
- Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (2012)
- El Materdor (2008)
- Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens - A Life in Animation (2000)
- Hayao Miyazaki and the Ghibli Museum (2005)
- Knick Knack (1989)
TV (3)
Where to start with John Lasseter
Start with Toy Story, and not out of nostalgia: it is the clearest statement of the method, a film about being replaced that never once says so out loud. Then go backwards to the shorts, because they are quick and they are where the ideas were tested. Luxo Jr. builds a complete parent and child dynamic with no faces and no dialogue, and Tin Toy is where the technology stops being the subject.
A Bug's Life is the least discussed of his features and holds up better than its reputation, mostly on the strength of its villain. Toy Story 2 is the better sequel of his career by some distance. Approach Cars with lowered expectations: the Route 66 material is sincere and the rest is a toy line. If you want the context rather than the films, The Pixar Story covers the studio's first two decades from the inside.
The Pixar features
Five features as director, and the first one changed what animation was for. Toy Story 2 is the better film of that pair, and the Cars pictures are the personal project that critics liked least and children liked most.
The shorts
This is where the grammar was worked out, one desk lamp at a time. Luxo Jr. runs two minutes, was made in 1986, and is the clearest single argument that computer animation could carry a performance. Tin Toy took the Oscar.
The documentaries
He turns up constantly as a talking head in animation documentaries, which fairly reflects how central he was for two decades. Waking Sleeping Beauty is the most honest of them about how that industry actually works.