Interview:
What's the Buzz?
'Toy Story' Director John Lasseter Talks About
Things Movie Directors Often Forget These Days
By BRUCE ORWALL
PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS is a technology company with the heart of a storyteller. It first attracted attention for its groundbreaking work in computer animation for short films. But when Pixar's first feature film, "Toy Story," co-produced with Walt Disney Co., made its debut in 1995, it wasn't the technology that made it a box-office smash -- it was the rich story and memorable characters like Buzz Lightyear and Woody.
At the heart of Pixar's emphasis on devising stories that work in sync with the technology -- instead of being overwhelmed by it -- is "Toy Story" director John Lasseter. A traditional animator by trade, he became excited by the story-boosting possibilities of technology while at Disney in the early 1980s. He then made a leap of faith by joining fledgling Pixar in 1986.
At Pixar, Mr. Lasseter has tried to bridge the worlds of art and technology in a way that produces entertainment memorable for its content, not just its flashy effects. Mr. Lasseter says he has tried to create an atmosphere in which "art challenged technology, and then technology inspired art." It worked in "Toy Story," and Pixar and Disney are betting that their approach will work again later this year when Pixar's second feature, "A Bug's Life," opens.
Mr. Lasseter recently took a break from "Bug's" to talk about the path Pixar has followed to make certain that its films keep their focus on story and character in a world of fantastic technologies.
WSJ: You started at Disney. What kind of a career did you envision going into this?
Mr. Lasseter: My mother was a high-school art teacher for 38 years, and I was always considered the artist of the class, whatever class I was in, all through school. My high school had a very strong art department with really good teachers. In high school, I always, always loved cartoons. I would get up every Saturday morning and watch cartoons until the bowling or golf matches came on. And then, it was in high school that I read this book on the art of animation that talked about the way Disney did its films. And it dawned on me -- people do this for a living. I was a freshman in high school and I said, "That's what I want to do." I was very much caught up in the art of animation as opposed to the technology of animation.
WSJ: Did people then talk about technology as being a big part of the profession?
Mr. Lasseter: No, there was really not much discussion of the technology. It was mostly about the art and the storytelling and the filmmaking aspect of it. I was in the very first year of the Cal Arts [California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, Calif.] character-animation program. I got my degree, made two short films that were just pencil animation, and both films won student Academy Awards. Then I went to work for Disney, and I was working as an animator on "Mickey's Christmas Carol" when they made the movie "Tron" [released in 1982].
They worked with outside computer-animation studios to do all of the effects. I remember seeing some early dailies from one of the sequences they produced, and it absolutely amazed me. I felt that Disney was, at the time, doing the same old thing. They had reached a certain plateau technically and artistically with, I think, "101 Dalmatians," and then everything had been kind of the same ever since then, with a glimmer of characters or sequences that were special. But it hadn't advanced anywhere.
When I saw the very first bits of "Tron," my gut said: "This is it. This [where special effects take over an entire scene] is the future." I already was making the leap to character animation and what we were working on. So I got very excited and started talking about this. I thought it was obvious, and no one else was seeing it.
WSJ: It sounds like a moment to remember.
Mr. Lasseter: That was a real moment. Finding that book on the art of animation in the high-school library and seeing the first dailies of "Tron" were the turning points of my life, I would say. But while I thought this was kind of obvious, no one else was seeing it. Myself and a fellow animator at Disney named Glen Keane, who's still their superstar animator, convinced the executives to let us do a 30-second test where we combined hand-drawn animation with computer-generated backgrounds. This was around 1981. And it took a while because the company we used to do the computer animation was in New York, and they had to write some special software.
When it was done, to me, it showed the possibilities. For the first time we were able to free the camera up in Disney animation and move it around like a steadycam, in and around [animated] objects, and underneath and through things, following the characters. It really was very, very exciting.
Disney at the time was only looking at the computer as a cost savings. They immediately thought, "Maybe a computer can make what we do cheaper." But I was looking at it as an artistic advance. This is something that is going to change the way movies look and the way that we make movies. I didn't know if it was going to be a cost savings or not. That is not what excited me.
So the fire was lit under me. I went to LucasFilm [in 1983] to work in [Pixar co-founder] Ed Catmull's group in the LucasFilm computer division, which was the premier computer-animation research group in the world. They brought me in as the animator -- as the super user, you might say -- to work with them to develop some of this technology. I was in heaven.
I stayed with that group, made a short film and worked on "Young Sherlock Holmes," which was one of the first feature films to use computer animation perfectly blended with the film, where you couldn't tell it was computer animation. Up until then, computer animation was used to simulate the inside of a computer, or to make something digitized so that it had a computery look.
WSJ: As an artist, what was it about that that excited you or opened up new possibilities to you?
Mr. Lasseter: It was the dimensionality of the world that excited me. I've always loved it when you go and look at a model-railroad club that has built this incredible, incredible landscape full of trains and mountains and cities and trestles and all that stuff. Or you go to see dioramas at museums of Indian villages in miniature. Or even on people's mantels at Christmastime when they have the little houses lit up and the street scenes and so on. All these things have always fascinated me.
That's what got me excited about this -- the idea of doing a more dimensional world, yet always being cartoon, always caricature, not reproducing reality. That's why I never found myself as interested in doing film effects, I was interested in telling stories.
WSJ: It certainly seems like it would have been easy for you to go in that direction.
Mr. Lasseter: Yes, at the time there was a decision to either stay with LucasFilm and become an animator at Industrial Light & Magic, or go with this new venture Pixar, even though at the time it was just going to be a computer company and a software company. [Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs had bought the LucasFilm computer division and created Pixar from it.] But I went with Pixar because Ed Catmull had a dream to do a feature film with this medium, which was my dream as well.
I was very fortunate to continue doing the research by doing an animated short film every year. I worked with a small group [of technical directors], and we worked together as a team and made these little short films. The first one we did was "Luxo Jr." which in 1986 was the first computer-animated film to be nominated for an Oscar. Then we went on a couple of years later to do "Tin Toy," which won the Academy Award [for best short film in 1989].
WSJ: Was there, in the early days, a struggle between trying to accomplish something artistically and just figuring out what it was possible to do with the technical capabilities that you were developing?
Mr. Lasseter: It wasn't a struggle as much as inspiration. This is one of the unique things about Pixar. It's based on this working relationship that I gained really early working with the group. I came in as a trained animator, an artist, with no computer experience, working with some of the most brilliant minds in computer-animation research.
I figured, there's no way I can know everything they know, so I'm not even going to try. I'm just going to work with them. And there's no way they can bring a character to life like I can through animation. So therefore, they just worked with me. It's a relationship where art challenged technology and then technology inspired art.
What happened was, I would come up with an idea and say, "Can you do this?" And they would try, and what they would do was not what I expected, but something different. And it opened my mind to all the other different possibilities that I had never even thought about. And then I said, "Well if you can do that, how about this?"
It kept going back and forth. Sometimes I would be inspired to do a different character. Sometimes a whole new story idea would come out of this stuff. Early on I had the image that when we started hiring more animators, the key was to get people with traditional animation experience, not computer experience.
WSJ: It's such a simple notion, keeping a focus on clever characters and stories. Why does it get lost so often?
Mr. Lasseter: It's difficult to do. We at Pixar have always viewed ourselves as storytellers first and computer animators second. We use computers as our tools, but we really view ourselves as filmmakers first. I have just constantly had the mantra, and pounded it into their heads, that the story comes first, no matter what we were doing. Even in a minute-and-a-half short film, the story drove it all.
Of course, there are strong technical limitations that you have to work within, but my philosophy is that people come and sit in a theater, and they give you their time to watch your movie. That's an important responsibility. They're willing to give me a little portion of their life, so I want to entertain them. I don't want them to be bored.
Great imagery alone is not going to keep people in their seats. You may get away with it in a short film, or the first five minutes of a feature. But after that, it's story, story, story, and compelling characters. If you don't have that, forget it. No matter how great the imagery is, people are going to walk away and say, "Eh, it looked good." You want people walking out of the theater saying, "WOW, WASN'T THAT GREAT!?!"
With "Toy Story," in the middle of the climax, the big chase where they're trying to get on the moving van, I don't think anybody was thinking about how many polygons Buzz and Woody were made of, or how many texture maps were being used, or how many leaves were on the trees back there, or how complex the imagery was. They just wanted Buzz and Woody to get on the van. That's what it really gets down to. The technology is in service of the story, yet we love the medium so much that the story is inspired by the technology.
WSJ: How do you enforce that mantra among the people who are crafting this?
Mr. Lasseter: I guess I don't need to tell people that much anymore, because everyone working at Pixar knows that, and even on "Toy Story" they did. But you get to a point where at times you have to say, "OK, we really can't do that," or, "We can't afford to spend the time to do this for one shot." So we rethink it a little bit and try to come up with something that is doable.
That's really the responsibility I have as the director. I get in there and really try to understand how this is done, and oftentimes what happens is, in doing that, I think, "Oh you don't need to go that far. All I need for the story is this."
Computer programming is a very exacting process. One [stray] comma, and a program crashes. It doesn't work. Therefore, at times they tend to take things very literally, to make things absolutely perfect. Part of my job is to say, that's good enough. You don't need to make every little teeny thing in the whole movie as detailed as it can possibly be.
I tell them, "Guys, you won't see it." It's too far away, or it's off in the bottom of the frame, or we whiz by it. "It just needs to not look computer-generated, that's all I ask of you."
WSJ: There are different cultures for artists and writers and computer technicians. Do you try to do things to bridge those different worlds?
Mr. Lasseter: We have a Pixar University that offers classes open to everyone, that encourages people in drawing. There are all sorts of different drawing and acting and motion classes. We try to encourage the technical directors, the technical artists, to take these classes along with the animators.
WSJ: What does one of your tech people get out of being in an acting class, for example?
Mr. Lasseter: It's an understanding of the motivations of what the animator does. As the animators work at Pixar, we really talk in terms of character motivations. Our animators are really the actors of the films. At the beginning we really analyze the characters and try to come up with traits and ways that they move that are unique to that character, so that not all the characters in the film move the same way or have the same kind of gestures.
Part of the goal is to make all of the movement that the characters make in the film appear to the audience that they're generated by that character's own thought process, as opposed to just moving from point A to point B. Once it's really alive and thinking, that's when people suspend belief and it becomes compelling.
Those characters then become alive to us as well. There are certain things that one character would do that another would not. So that's the kind of thing that you impart. A lot of the technical artists like to understand that as well. The technical artists that create the models that the animators will use, they like to understand why we need certain controls.
So we try to keep all the lines of communication open. In the same way that when I was working by myself, as the only artist-animator in the group, I would sit there and ask questions: why, why, why all the time. I learned so much, and I was inspired so much by the technology, that I therefore kept challenging them to do more and different things all the time. I wanted to make sure to give this opportunity to the other artists who are working with us -- the animators, the painters, the designers in the art department. They become better at your artistic task the more they have a basic understanding of the technology around it.
WSJ: What do the artists and writers need to know about the technology?
Mr. Lasseter: When we develop a story, the initial idea is usually inspired by a subject matter that is really doable, lends itself to our medium. With "Toy Story," toys were a natural. The computer tends to make things look plastic anyway, so why not have plastic characters as your main characters. All of the details, the rivets and screws, all of the decals, it just lent itself to the medium.
In the same way, insects, in our new movie "A Bug's Life," lend themselves beautifully to the medium. The exoskeletons, the iridescence of bugs, the transparency and translucency of their wings -- all of that lends itself beautifully to the medium.
Then, once we start developing the story, I tend to try and protect in the early stage -- protect the story guys from technical constraint. It's hard enough developing a story, much less to handcuff them with all of these technical constraints. Then at a certain point in the story development, I do a doability test.
For instance, there is a scene that was cut early on from "Toy Story," in which Buzz ended up in the little baby girl's crib. The next morning she was in the kitchen having breakfast, and she was dunking his head in oatmeal. And so at a certain point, it was a doability test. We looked at that and said, oatmeal is really, really hard to do. Let's just do Cheerios. That's easy. It kind of serves the same purpose, milk with Cheerios, and that was more doable.
Another example the other way is when we did our short film "Knick Knack," about a little snowman and a snowball. We did not know how to do swirling snow. This is something that the whole film is sort of based around. If we can't do this, tell me now, we'll come up with a different idea. They said, "OK, we know it's important to the story, we'll figure out a way to do it." It's these kind of tradeoffs that you always do.
WSJ: Looking ahead to "Bug's," certainly there are expectations this time-technically and artistically -- because of what you did with "Toy Story." The first time, the computer animation that you did really jumped off the screen at people. Now it's something that's been in their heads for a few years. That creates a bit of additional technical pressure. How, going into this new project, did you approach the "top this" mentality of the industry and keep it in balance?
Mr. Lasseter: We bit off a lot to chew. This is far more complex. It's a bigger story. It's an epic with a lot more characters. And it's a visual world that is very organic, which is more difficult to do than a geometric world like "Toy Story" was. In doing it, at times you make compromises, but keeping your eye on the story is the important thing.
The story required it to be a little more epic. We didn't set out to say, "Let's do an epic." So it's really having the confidence to let the story develop into what it needs to be, then taking a hard look at it and trimming it down to only what it needs to be. It's like Japanese architecture. You design something, and then you take away until you take away no more, because from then on, anything you take away will affect the overall, either structurally or aesthetically. We try to pare it down to what's essential.
WSJ: How does the need to be technologically amazing and jaw-dropping affect your thinking when you're trying to determine what's possible as a next step?
Mr. Lasseter: The story inspires the production design and the art direction. We try to design things in a beautiful way. We don't set out to say, "Let's make this jaw-dropping." When the story calls for this moment, you just say, this is going to be great. And then you go to town.
You cannot afford to make every minute as amazing as you can. In a way, you need to pace your film so that you have rests visually, so that when the action stuff does come, it really stands out. If you keep everything at this supercomplex, very active level, the audience becomes numb.
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