John lasseter

A hobby encouraged by his mother, an art professor at the university, and who was open-minded enough to appreciate this form of artistic expression. So when teenager John discovered, thanks to Bob Thomas’ book The Art of Animation, that becoming an animator could be a way to make a living, he didn’t hesitate. He wanted to remain a child, offering adventures led by animated characters; and his family agreed. So he studied at the California Institute of the Arts, where Disney’s animation teachers taught, and there he definitely fell in love with Uncle Walt’s films.

For an animator to visit the Disney studios was to him the equivalent of a devout Mohammedan making a pilgrimage to Mecca. His classmates at that time includedTim Burton , John Musker , Chris Buck , and Brad Bird .

Lasseter’s next step was clear: sign with Disney. There he spent 5 years as an animator, in films like Mickey’s Christmas Carol . While working there, he watched the developments of a company film that combined live action and computer animation: Tron . That film opened his eyes to the possibilities that new technologies offered to animation, for example when it came to offering three-dimensionality. In this field he found new possibilities in Lucas Film Computer, a company created by Georges Lucas to promote special effects. Lasseter had loved it in 1977 ‘s Star Wars, and mainly his achievement of liking all kinds of audiences; and in the face of conservative opinions that animated films were aimed only at children’s audiences, he believed that this broad spectrum of viewers was also within his reach. Lucas opened a new horizon for him by making him see that not only the backgrounds could be animated with a computer; the same could be done with the characters. With computer tools and the collaboration of Ed Catmull (a computer scientist whose frustrated dream until then was animation) the seeds of what would be Pixar began to be laid, putting an end to the divorce that existed between programmers and animators: those who developed the software they were ignorant when it came to cartoons, and the cartoonists had an unfounded fear of losing their job;

Lamparita , a short starring some gooseneck lamps, which gave rise to the Pixar logo, surprised the experts. Not only because it was made with a computer, but because the story had a soul. Lasseter understood this when a friend told him that he wanted to ask him something; he expected a technical consultation, but no, he only wanted to know if one lamp was the mother or father of the other. The short had an Oscar nomination; he did not win it, but he later had three Oscars in this category, in 1989 for Tin Toy , in 1997 for Geri’s Game, and in 2001 for Little Birds .

When Disney, after a season of crisis, was once again shining in the field of animation thanks to people like Roy Disney, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, they took a look at Pixar de Lesseter and Steve Jobs, and reached an agreement to produce their films. films, while retaining independence. Lasseter respected the Disney style of a leading man, lots of supporting characters, and lots of songs, but he saw things differently. He wanted to make the incredible credible, “to make things realistic without reproducing reality.”

Lasseter likes to work from concepts, and believes that a script must be given a thousand and one twists to make it work. An idea that is repeated in all his lengths is that of a “colleague couple”, typical of the police genre, as in the Lethal Weapon saga. This is the case in both Toy Story , A Bug ‘s Life , Monsters, SA and Finding Nemo. To this he adds each time a master thread: the toy that is not capable of accepting that it is that, a toy; the toy that does not serve the purpose for which it was created, locked in a glass case; the ants that recruit a team to face the grasshoppers that explode them; the boy who thinks he has a monster in his closet; the smallness of the world when it is limited by the walls of a fish tank. Undoubtedly the best proof that Lasseter pampers the scripts of his films is his feat of having achieved an Oscar nomination in this section for Toy Story . Something amazing in a type of film that academics do not usually consider when voting for the golden statuettes.

Teamwork is a way of doing things in which Lasseter, far removed from the figure of the tyrannical creator, believes. The filmmaker has given the alternative to directing to many of his collaborators; and he loves having work meetings, where good ideas and crazy gags always come up. Although his team of consultants never lacks his own family, his wife and his five children, a public whose criteria he trusts a lot.