Welcome to my world

John Lasseter, founder of Pixar and director of Toy Story, tells Jonathan Ross about the joys of computer animation

Jonathan Ross: John, first of all thank you very much for coming over when so many of your countrymen have proved themselves to be such cowards. Mention no names, but Bruce Willis springs immediately to mind. Let's go right back to how you got into animation in the first place. I assume this was traditional two-dimensional cel animation?

John Lasseter: Yes that's right.

JR: Where did you start in the business?

JL: Well, back in the day when I was a little guy, there was no home video, no 24-hour cable channels, so Saturday morning and after school - basically that was it, so when Bugs Bunny was on I was in front of the TV. I just adored it. When I was in high school I read this book called The Art of Animation, by Bob Thomas. It's all about the Walt Disney studio and the making of Sleeping Beauty. I read this and it like dawned on me - wait a minute, people do animation for a living?

When I graduated from high school they were starting a programme at the California Institute for the Arts. It was a character-animation programme taught by all these old Disney artists. Tim Burton was in my class; John Musker, who's done a lot of the animated features at Disney; Chris Buck, who directed Tarzan; Brad Bird, who did Iron Giant. After that, I did two student films that won student Academy awards back to back. And then I went to work for Disney as an animator and I worked there for about five years. I worked on Mickey's Christmas Carol as an animator - but friends of mine were working on a new movie called Tron and they showed me some of the very early computer graphics.

It was like a little door in my head opened up and it was, like, "Wait a minute, this is really cool." It wasn't about what I was seeing, but the potential I saw in this.

But at that time Disney was not into pushing the art form. To them animation had become just for kids. My interest led me to work with a wonderful fellow called Ed Catmull, whom George Lucas had hired to develop some new tools using computers. We did a short film called The Adventures of Andre and Willy B, and it really was exciting - it was simple and geometric, but I brought it to life. It was premiered at Siggraph, the big computer-graphics convention, in 1984.

In 1986 we formed a separate company called Pixar, and right away Ed came to me and said, "Let's do a film for Siggraph this year", and we did Luxo Jr. The place went nuts. People really saw that this was different. We just locked the camera down and had no background, but it made the audience focus on what was important in the film - the story and the characters. For the first time, a film was entertaining people with nothing except computer animation.

JR: But what was it that drove you on? The reason we love your movies so much is because we respond to the characters and stories as much, if not more so than the animation. But those stories could have been told using conventional animation.

JL: Great animation is where the subject matter matches itself to the medium it's being made in, so you can't imagine it being made in any other medium. I think Luxo Jr wouldn't be the same in hand-drawn or puppet animation.

I remember once, in the early days before Pixar, I got into a discussion on whether I wanted to do a background for Andre and Willy B with a neat program that created pine trees and stuff - very abstract - and I remember sitting there and asking them to do purple trees, and one of the guys turned and said: "Trees are not purple, John." I said, "They are, if the light's right." And he went outside, snapped off a leaf, came in, put it under the light and said: "Trees are not purple." So I packed him up and drove to San Francisco, to an exhibit of Maxfield Parrish and I walked him around, I didn't say a word and after he said: "You're right, trees can be whatever colour you want because it's all in the light." And Maxfield Parrish has been a driving force at Pixar, because of the richness of light - he really inspired us.

JR: With that story you are perpetuating the myth that computer programmers don't get out often enough, you realise that, don't you?

JL: Back then it was the truth!

JR: After Andre and Willy B, which I guess was an exception, were you looking for stories and ideas that you would animate inanimate objects?

JL: I lucked into Luxo Jr because I was learning how to model on the computer and I had a drawing table with a Luxor lamp on it. I literally looked up and started measuring it with a ruler and modelling the geometric shapes. Then I got it into the computer and added the articulations that you need and I just started moving it around as though it were alive.

So I just had a natural love of bringing inanimate objects alive. That led on to Tin Toy, the predecessor to Toy Story. It was really fun looking at a baby from a toy's point of view when all it wants to do is slobber on it. It goes from being cute to being a monster.

Then came Knick Knack - one of our funniest ones and one I'm very proud of. It's simple and geometric. It ended the first phase of Pixar, our short film phase: Knick Knack was the last short film I did before we went on to Toy Story. It's interesting to watch Knick Knack because it's so simple and still just so funny. I've just always believed in this medium. That was the last bit of animation I ever did personally.

JR: So you're not hands-on any more?

JL: No, I direct. All of our short films throughout the 80s were developing the tools and the know-how in order to attempt to do a feature film. When we became Pixar we started working with Disney by helping them with a software project to do their computer system called CAP. So we started an association with them, the new regime - the Roy Disney, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Frank Wells regime.

I kept getting calls after every single one of the short films asking me to come back. So we finally convinced them to let us do a feature film for them here at Pixar. They were open to it. But it all depended on the story.

So I remember us huddling together, wondering what we were going to do. I remember going back to Tin Toy and saying, "I love toys and there's much more we can do with it." One of the things we didn't want was a fairytale with a main character, with a lot of side characters and eight songs - you know, a template of Disney animated films. They're really wonderful, but we didn't want to do the same old thing.

We looked around at different film genres and tried to think of something that hadn't been done in animation. We ended up with the idea of doing a buddy picture. I love buddy pictures - you know, The Odd Couple, Midnight Run with Charles Grodin and Robert De Niro.

Buddy pictures have become a hallmark of the Pixar films: you have a main character that you like but then grows emotionally throughout the picture. The idea evolved into an old toy, a hand-me-down child's favourite toy, and on the kid's birthday he gets a brand spanking new toy. Toy Story.

JR: Let's move on to A Bug's Life, via a question that links the two movies, maybe. Am I right in thinking that, although you are using computer-generated animation, the lead-up to making the film is still traditional in terms of storyboarding and working with voiceover actors?

JL: Yes, it is right. We looked at the traditional feature animation process, and if it wasn't broken then we didn't fix it. We still develop stories in the same way that Walt Disney always did - with storyboards. One evolutionary thing is that Toy Story was the very first time that the story reels were cut on a digital editing system called Avid. We saw that this was a way to get a faster turnaround with story reels.

For those not familiar with the animation process, it's like live-action film-making - you have a script, a set, a location; you take a scene and you will shoot it from many different angles and many different takes of all the actors. That's the coverage, right? That then goes into the editing rooms and you have lots of choices to cut together and make the movie. In animation the production is so expensive, you only have one chance to do one scene, so we edit it in advance of production. What's exciting is that this is one place where we can use computer technology to help the creative process. Now everyone uses Avid, but we pioneered that process.

One positive thing is that this meant we had closer relations with an editor who came up to help us, and he's ended up being one of my closest creative colleagues, and that's Lee Unkrich. He's co-directed, edited Toy Story and A Bug's Life, co-directed Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. He comes from a live-action background and it's like going to film school with him. The number-one rule I have is that we will never use a story reel that isn't working because it will never be saved or fixed by animation. A story reel has got to work, and it's got to be funny.

We re-do, re-do, re-do and re-do storyboards, because we can do many different versions of it, because drawings are still relatively cheap. There is a scene in Monsters, Inc that had to be storyboarded about 36 times. The total number is over 45,000 individual drawings. We really sweat over the story. The story dictates what needs to be designed, needs to be modelled on the computer. We then go and record the dialogue. We get the models and do the layout, get the camera angles with the dialogue. The animators work on the acting - the physical action of the characters - working on the inspiration from the voice recordings.

Then it is lit to give shadow, and so on, and it finally goes to the computers for final rendering. The more organic something is, the more difficult it is. You take a sphere, within three numbers the computer can make it. You put a dent in it, now you have to describe all the surface differences - more magnitude and data. Toy Story was perfect material because the computers make everything look plastic, which the toys were. It worked.

JR: I noticed that with the human characters in Monsters, Inc - Boo and the other children - you went back to a stylised approach to animating rather than the hyper-realistic approach we saw in the Final Fantasy movie.

JL: At Pixar, we like to think we use our tools to make things look photorealistic, but not try to reproduce reality. We like to take those tools and make something that the audience knows does not exist. Every frame, they know it's a cartoon. So you get that wonderful entertainment of, "I know this isn't real, but boy it sure looks real." I think that's part of the fun of what we do.

The closer you get to trying to reproducing reality, the much harder it is - especially human beings. The audience see human beings every day, so you know when it's not right. That's why we try and stay in the stylised world, which I think is successful. I don't see the point in reproducing a human being, because you get a camera and a great actor and trust me it's so much cheaper and easier...and it will be so much more successful.

John Lasseter was talking to Jonathan Ross in the Guardian Interview at the NFT. Read the full transcript at film.guardian.co.uk. Monsters, Inc will be released next year.

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