John Lasseter Says Goodbye to Disney and Pixar: In 39 Years, What Did This Genius Change?

Who could have guessed he would go out this way?

Had he not been caught up in a sexual harassment scandal, no one would have imagined that John Lasseter would repeat what happened 34 years ago and be shown the door at Disney a second time.

On June 8 local time, Disney announced that the most powerful figure in American animation would formally leave the company at the end of this year. Until then he will serve as a consultant and hand over his work, but nowhere in Disney will an office be kept for him. As for the two chief creative officer posts Lasseter is vacating — one at Disney Animation, one at Pixar — no one has yet been found to fill them.

Over the past year and more, the #MeToo movement has swept through Hollywood, and a number of well-known figures in American entertainment have been exposed for sexual harassment. But unlike Harvey Weinstein and others who faced criminal charges, the accusations against Lasseter were never that specific. According to a November 2017 report in The Hollywood Reporter, Lasseter was known for "grabbing, kissing, and commenting on physical attributes," and the report quoted former insiders as saying, "He would hold on to you and everyone would be watching — it's an invasion of your (personal) space."

After the story broke, Lasseter released a memo: "I especially want to apologize to anyone who has been on the receiving end of an unwanted hug from me, or any other gesture of mine they felt crossed a line. However well I meant it, everyone has the right to set their own boundaries and to have them respected." He then announced he was taking six months off.

Even then, people guessed that Lasseter would eventually have to leave Disney over it. And so he has.

It is worth noting that from beginning to end, no legal body was ever involved in the matter. The accusations were never substantiated either.

After Disney announced his coming departure, Lasseter released a statement through the company that said little about his conduct. "While I remain fully devoted to the art of animation, and inspired by the creative talent at Disney and Pixar, I have decided that the end of this year is the right time for me to turn my attention to new creative challenges."

He did not say what those new creative challenges are. But one thing is certain: Lasseter will never again do what he did after he left Disney the first time, in 1984, and bring American animation a revolution from top to bottom.

Lasseter in 1979, and his first setback at Disney

American animation in the 1980s looked nothing like it does now. The animated films you can see in a theater today, from Zootopia to Minions, come from many different studios: Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Illumination, Blue Sky Studios and others. Computer modeling lets 3D characters make exaggerated movements and expressions on the big screen, vividly, and build the kind of visual spectacle you get in an action blockbuster. But more than 30 years ago, only Disney mattered in American animation, and it made traditional 2D hand-drawn films whose stories were mostly adapted from classic fairy tales. The Jungle Book, Robin Hood and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh were its signature works of the 1960s and 1970s.

In time Disney could not help but look old and decayed. Lasseter found the place lifeless. "Many young, talented animators got no recognition because of an ever more rigid hierarchy, and for one reason or another they left, one after another." "The artists who took over the studio were second-string animators who had spent decades on the bench... They felt their own position in the company was not secure enough, so they wanted to hold tight to their new status, and instead of encouraging newcomers they held them down."

Lasseter joined Disney in 1979, at 22. He found it nothing like the animation holy land he had pictured, and he could not help being discouraged.

In high school Lasseter had read The Art of Animation, a book about how Disney grew. He went to the California Institute of the Arts, the school Walt Disney founded, and had worked as a river guide on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. When he graduated he made a short film, Lady and the Lamp, as a tribute to Disney's Lady and the Tramp.

As Lasseter saw it, the 1961 Disney film One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the peak of Disney animation, but after that there was never any innovation, which made each new release feel stale and dull. He kept looking for a way to put life back into animation, until Disney released the live-action film Tron in 1982. It tells the story of a software engineer who is pulled by accident into a digital world and tries to escape. To render the beauty of that world, the film used a great deal of computer animation — the first time computer animation was used in a movie.

Tron captivated Lasseter almost at once, and he came to believe that computer animation was exactly the innovation Disney animation lacked. In 1983, excited, he proposed to his bosses an animated film called The Brave Little Toaster, the story of "a lamp, a toaster, a blanket, a radio and a vacuum cleaner, dumped by their owner in an old house in the woods, who go through every hardship to get back to him."

His bosses could not make sense of Lasseter's "wild fancy" at all. Disney was used to little animals and princesses and simply could not see why a lamp and a toaster should be the leads in an animated film. Harder still to grasp was Lasseter's proposal to combine computer animation with hand-drawn animation in the same film. Not long after he pitched it, Ron Miller, then head of Disney Animation, called him into his office: "John, your project is finished now, so our working relationship is finished too."

Meeting Catmull, and the birth of Pixar

Luckily, if the entertainment business could not see the value of Lasseter's proposal, the computer business could. Transistor computers arrived in the 1960s and made computers a commercial product, and many people began exploring what could be done with them. Computer graphics was one of the important fields.

Ed Catmull, who would become Lasseter's long-time partner, was admitted to the computer science doctoral program at the University of Utah in 1969. Under his adviser's influence, Catmull settled on a research direction: develop a way of drawing with a computer, and produce images good enough and beautiful enough to meet the standards of film. He went on to work out the most basic techniques of 3D modeling and texture mapping. In 1973 he used his own left hand to make the short film A Computer Animated Hand, showing in four minutes the movements of a hand and the fine texture of its surface.

The wall between computing and entertainment was broken down in 1979 by George Lucas. Lucas had just made his name in Hollywood with Star Wars. Shooting it, he had used a motion control system, with a computer driving the camera's movement. That made him realize that putting digital technology together with film might create many different visual experiences.

In 1979 Lucas went to Catmull and asked him to build a full range of technology for digitizing film: a digital film printer, digital sound, digital editing and, of course, Catmull's own line of work, computer graphics. The department Catmull led was called the Lucasfilm Computer Development Division. In 1985 Lucas split it off and sold it to Steve Jobs, who renamed the company Pixar after the computer graphics system Catmull's team had built.

Jobs's original interest in Pixar was only that he hoped its graphics system could become a new generation of personal computer and help him fight the Apple that had pushed him out. But in the end he respected Catmull's wishes and let Pixar go on trying to join computers to image-making — that is, to create its own animation. On that point Catmull and Lasseter wanted the same thing. In 1984, having left Disney, Lasseter joined Pixar as a matter of course.

Compare 1995's Toy Story with 2018's Incredibles 2 and you can see how far computer animation has come in 40 years. But at the time Pixar's computer animation could already be called ready enough: at the very least it could draw backgrounds and characters and let an audience follow the main story without confusion. The only problem was that Catmull and his partners did not know how to tell a story.

That was what Lasseter was good at. On top of computer technology that had already been developed, his gift for stories found its use. The first job Catmull gave him was a short film, Breakfast with André (《与安德烈早餐》). As originally planned it was purely a showpiece: a robot wakes up early, yawns and stretches, demonstrating what computer graphics could do.

Lasseter frowned his way through the storyboards Pixar had already drawn for the short, then asked, tactfully, "Can I make a few suggestions?" He called them suggestions, but in fact he redid the whole thing. He added a wasp: when the robot wakes up and finds the wasp perched next to his head, he jumps out of his skin, and a chase begins. A technical showpiece became a lively little story just like that.

"I can only make objects move, but John can give them souls," Catmull said later, with feeling. "No matter how much you care about the visual craft, no matter how flawless the visual polish, none of it is as important as a good story."

In fact, when Breakfast with André was finally shown, most viewers were so taken by the chase that they did not notice the short was not actually finished: some frames were uncolored, and the character models were rough. That was the magic Lasseter brought to Pixar.

Lasseter changed the animation business: tell a story that isn't so pure and good

Catmull's technology plus Lasseter's stories changed the whole American animation business. Toy Story, Pixar's first animated feature, released in 1995, became the dividing line between the 2D era of American animation and the 3D era.

Woody is a cowboy doll belonging to a boy named Andy. He has a soul of his own, and when Andy is in the room he settles down and plays the part of Andy's toy. When Andy leaves, he and the other toys in the room live their own lives. Then one day the arrival of a new toy, Buzz Lightyear, changes everything: Woody, feeling that Andy has cooled on him, starts looking for a way to get Buzz out of the house. A story that does not look all that special today shook American audiences at the time, in every way.

In narrative terms, Toy Story broke the story formula of traditional Disney animation. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King — the Disney classics of the 1990s — all had a classical core. The hero starts out living a quiet life until one day an outside force intervenes and changes it, and the hero then looks for a way to restore what was. It assumes two sides, good and evil, and what good looks like is exactly how things were at the beginning.

Pixar's stories were much more of their time. Their core was usually about accepting change and living with it. At the end of Toy Story, Woody accepts that Buzz exists and shares Andy's affection with him. In a traditional Disney story, Buzz would have been drawn as a demon wrecking a utopia, someone to be driven out.

That changed core let Pixar build richer characters. Woody is no longer flawless; he is small-minded and jealous. When a character like that finally decides to take Buzz in, what it can make you feel is far richer than good beating evil. It is in that sense that Toy Story stopped being entertainment reserved for children and became food for grown-up minds. It can prompt people to think harder about human nature, and from there about themselves, and to find something of their own in it.

3D only means something when it serves a good story

In all this, 3D was not merely a vehicle; it also greatly widened what a story could do. Traditional 2D animation requires drawing every frame, which means 2D is not good at movement. Watch 2D animation closely and you will notice that characters outside the main plot are usually left still, to say nothing of the backgrounds.

3D is different. Through 3D modeling, software can calculate the movements in between automatically, so both characters and backgrounds feel much more alive. That hugely enriched what 3D animation could tell. In Toy Story, for instance, Rex and Mr. Potato Head both became memorable supporting characters precisely because the work 3D saved let the animators create more of them.

At the same time, 3D was seen as a big lift to a film's spectacle. Every Pixar film has one action sequence you remember: Buzz carrying Woody as they chase the car in Toy Story, the fight among the doors in Monsters, Inc., Remy scrambling away from humans in Ratatouille. Those sequences also owed something to computer modeling, which made animating movement less difficult.

The 3D animation Toy Story stands for and the 2D animation The Lion King stands for are two entirely different kinds of product. The differences between them run much deeper than the technology on the surface. After its release, Toy Story took more than $190 million at the North American box office, the equivalent of $400 million today, and was the top-grossing film in North America in 1995.

From then on, 3D rose as 2D fell. Audiences began to tire of Disney's fairy-tale-plus-musical animation, and through the 2000s each Disney animated film took less at the box office than the last. Pixar, meanwhile, thoroughly established its own brand: starting in 2003, almost every Pixar film was a huge success with both critics and audiences, and the studio became a regular at the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Pixar also spurred a crop of rivals into making 3D animation. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who left Disney after losing a power struggle, founded DreamWorks and competed with Pixar on the strength of the Shrek films. In 2002, Blue Sky Studios, a 20th Century Fox unit that had been doing computer effects, bet everything on developing the Ice Age series. Chris Meledandri, that series' lead producer, founded Illumination in 2007 and developed the Despicable Me series. In 2016, after Illumination's parent, Universal Pictures, bought DreamWorks Animation, Meledandri took charge of both animation companies at once, and Universal chairman Jeff Shell called Meledandri Universal's John Lasseter.

In that sense, it is no exaggeration to say that John Lasseter changed the entire American animation business.

Back to Disney

In 2006, Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion. John Lasseter came back 20 years on, no longer the young man his bosses had seen as an outrageous troublemaker but Disney's savior. Between 1995 and 2006, as director and producer, he worked on seven Pixar films and did not miss once. Disney over the same years was stuck: Dinosaur, Treasure Planet and Atlantis all failed with critics and at the box office. In 2003 Disney made mass layoffs in its animation division, and the number of people who lost their jobs ran into four figures.

Disney needed Lasseter's personal creativity. It was seen as the most important guarantee of success. Lasseter wanted toys to have feelings of their own, and so the world got Toy Story. He wanted to make a film about a father and son, and so Finding Nemo was born. He also wondered what might be on the other side of a bedroom closet door — another world of monsters, perhaps — and so Pixar created Monsters, Inc.

Pixar's creative machinery mattered just as much. Andrew Millstein, president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, once told QDaily that Disney Animation had by then become a thoroughly bureaucratic place, where "making an animated film had turned completely into big bosses sitting in glass offices telling people what to do." Every animated film had to pass three rounds of review: the studio's development department, the head of the studio, and Michael Eisner, then Disney's chief executive. Their reviews arrived as "to-do lists" that the people making the film had to work through item by item, ticking each box when it was done.

Once Lasseter and Catmull moved in, they remade Disney from end to end. They started by breaking up the old office layout at Disney Animation, so that an office that had looked strictly stratified now had places where employees could talk about animation together. They also brought over the brain trust that worked so well at Pixar, where anyone could offer suggestions about a story without worrying about giving offense.

Disney Animation began to turn around. Starting with Tangled in 2010, Disney released Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia and more. Lasseter had a hand in all of them; Zootopia became a film about animals at his suggestion. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reported that every stage of making an animated film needed Lasseter's sign-off, from script to storyboard to the final cut.

"John has probably taught more people than any director in the world. So many of our colleagues have been able to learn from John directly," said Andrew Millstein.

But Lasseter's magic was fading too. Just as Disney Animation was on the rise, Pixar started to slip. Cars 2, Brave, The Good Dinosaur and Cars 3 disappointed with critics and at the box office alike. Coco and Inside Out count as fine work, but plenty of people still see them as a step down from the Pixar of the 1990s.

Was it that Lasseter was spread too thin to run both Disney Animation and Pixar? Or that Disney's strategy of developing intellectual property pushed Pixar toward sequels rather than original films and boxed his creativity in? Or simply that as he got older his creative powers declined? These guesses have always followed him around.

None of it has anything to do with Lasseter now. After the harassment scandal broke he stepped down as director of Toy Story 4, which deepened people's doubts about Pixar and Disney. Last December The New York Times quoted analysts as saying that "in the long run, there is no telling what effect Lasseter's departure will have on Disney and Pixar, or whether that effect will be good or bad." "It really is unlike anything we have ever observed. You have to believe there is something different about Lasseter to create so many great products."

Lasseter really was an unrestrained man. In front of a thousand people, he would haul an air cannon onstage and fire his trademark Hawaiian shirts into the crowd. At Disney's own fan events he would pick 20 shirts out of the more than 1,000 Hawaiian shirts he owned and put them on display.

Here's hoping he still gets the chance to be unrestrained.

Images from Toy Story.