John Lasseter

Richard Neupert

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780252098352
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Performing Arts

Celebrated as Pixar's "Chief Creative Officer, " John Lasseter is a revolutionary figure in animation history and one of today's most important filmmakers. Lasseter films from Luxo Jr. to Toy Story and Cars 2 highlighted his gift for creating emotionally engaging characters. At the same time, they helped launch computer animation as a viable commercial medium and serve as blueprints for the genre's still-expanding commercial and artistic development.

Richard Neupert explores Lasseter's signature aesthetic and storytelling strategies and details how he became the architect of Pixar's studio style. Neupert contends that Lasseter's accomplishments emerged from a unique blend of technical skill and artistic vision, as well as a passion for working with collaborators. In addition, Neupert traces the director's career arc from the time Lasseter joined Pixar in 1984. As Neupert shows, Lasseter's ability to keep a foot in both animation and CGI allowed him to thrive in an unconventional corporate culture that valued creative interaction between colleagues. The ideas that emerged built an animation studio that updated and refined classical Hollywood storytelling practices--and changed commercial animation forever.

John Lasseter and the Rise of Pixar Style

Lasseter and company work from the Wes Anderson/Tarantino/Aardman template, in that their films seem to take place in neither the past nor the present but in a fondly recalled time.

—Kent Jones, “Beyond Disbelief”

An Apprenticeship in Animation

John Lasseter (b. 1957) is the much-celebrated chief creative officer for Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios. He is also one of the best known and most successful animators in the world. In fact, his closest peer today may be Hayao Miyazaki. Both men have brought new attention and critical respect to cartoon stories and styles. Lasseter has also proven instrumental in Pixar’s meteoric rise as the most recognized animation brand on the planet. Movies directed by Lasseter, from Luxo Jr. (1986) to Toy Story (1995) to Cars 2 (2011), helped launch computer animation as a viable commercial medium and guide its subsequent technical and aesthetic development. Further, his Luxo lamp character became an immediate icon, recognized for high-quality, engaging animation. Equally significant is Lasseter’s rare ability to adapt and update traditional two-dimensional character-animation principles for a clever synthesis with the 3D computer-generated imagery of the digital era.

Clearly, John Lasseter is one of the most important figures in American cinema today. He has contributed to the revival of character animation and helped propel a return to feature-length animation in Hollywood and beyond. Moreover, Lasseter may have done more to foster thinking, embodied computer-generated characters than anyone else. This Contemporary Film Director series book investigates the individual aesthetic and storytelling strategies that distinguish John Lasseter’s films and explains how his personal style grew into a studio style for Pixar. Primary emphasis will be placed on the first several stages of Lasseter’s career and his collaborative mode of production within Pixar Studios. By the time of Cars and Disney’s purchase of Pixar, both in 2006, John Lasseter was firmly positioned as the single most important individual behind Pixar’s productions and a new source of optimism for Disney’s future animation output. This book chronicles the rise of Lasseter’s career and the groundbreaking animated films he directed, revealing ways he and his colleagues at Pixar changed the direction of commercial animation forever.

Admittedly, discussing auteur traits in a commercial animator, director, and producer raises concerns for some contemporary critics. During an era with media products such as director commentaries, online interviews, and “making of” bonuses, auteurs are marketed in ever more complex ways via media saturation, commercial tie-ins, and media convergences. As Dana Polan points out, such marketing of the auteur’s brand “is not only imposed on the director by external forces in the business but can come from his own savvy self-promotional tactics” (4). Art cinema and independent directors have always relied upon appeals to their auteur status to garner support and close attention. Hollywood studios have long exploited the auteur as a means for product differentiation. As a producer and studio namesake, Walt Disney famously “performed authorship of his studio’s output,” positioning himself as the benevolent, responsible patriarch for his family of films and characters (Griffin 140–41). Film historians and theorists routinely acknowledge the potential pitfalls of concentrating on auteurs, yet there remains a persistent faith in the value of studying the contributions of particularly significant individuals for what they can tell us about film culture but also the media industries in which they function. Fan culture typically perceives few of the critical traps. As Adrian Martin points out, “Auteurism in cinema has always been about an intimate, often secret complicity—we in the audience feel ourselves privileged if we hear or receive the silent ‘voice’ of the auteur, as if we have received a special gift” (98). Lasseter’s employers, Pixar and Disney, have clearly exploited Lasseter’s auteurist fame to great effect. Just prior to the release of Toy Story, for instance, Wired had already pronounced Lasseter one of animation’s “authentic, trailblazing stars. … If, as they say, whimsy is coded into the genes of animators, Lasseter was definitely born with it” (Snider 149). Lasseter became one of Pixar’s biggest assets very early on, and his valuable cultural currency has grown exponentially ever since.

Directors such as John Lasseter, operating in digital, global, mainstream cinema, may be said to offer special hurdles for critics. Andrew Darley points out that digital effects-driven filmmaking, and especially what he calls the “spectacle cinema” of high-budget computer animation, has shifted some of the attention away from creative individual filmmakers and onto their companies and even technologies. Thus, “whilst not exactly displacing director names, it could be argued that [companies such as Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic] have tended to vie with them as a way of accounting for or measuring creative worth within the popular aesthetic imagination” (137). Darley mentions that only two animation and digital-effects directors manage to survive as auteurs in the popular press today. John Lasseter is one of them, though Darley only refers to him by name within a footnote (203). Yet somewhat paradoxically, the highly capitalized mode of computer animation also repositions the animator-artist at the core of production. As Thomas Elsaesser points out, the digital turn in cinema “requires a new kind of individual input, indeed manual application of craft and skill, which is to say, it marks the return of the ‘artist’ as source and origin of the image” (192). Pixar manages to counter some of the resistance to their corporate clout and commercialism by emphasizing the insight, artistry, and hard work of John Lasseter whenever possible. His highly innovative skill sets and career moves are closely tied to Pixar’s successful trajectory: “It is only because Pixar, under the tutelage of Lasseter, struck upon its own way of integrating the new capacities of CGI with the traditions of feature animation that it has been able to create characters consistently capable of supporting a globally integrated marketing success” (Schaffer 77). John Lasseter warrants close study on many levels.

As with the other books in this series, John Lasseter remains committed to the notion that explaining the work habits and creative choices of an influential filmmaker can teach us much about the craft of cinematic storytelling and, in Lasseter’s case, the development of computer animation and the Pixar style. Kristin Thompson argues that Pixar has remained a world leader precisely because they learned quickly how to market their films just like mainstream live-action cinema, including their exploitation of Lasseter: “John Lasseter is sort of the Steven Spielberg of animation—one of the few directors with wide popular name-recognition” (Bordwell and Thompson 163). It is precisely Lasseter’s author-function that concerns us here. We are primarily interested in the degree to which he put his mark on Pixar stories and styles in a division of the film industry known for expansive teams with specialized divisions of labor and constant, highly capitalized, technological change and development. Further, Lasseter’s career path and eventual creative choices were greatly shaped by the era in which he grew up. An increasingly global entertainment industry was undergoing fundamental changes during the 1970s and 1980s, just at the moment when Lasseter and his new generation of computer-savvy young artists and entrepreneurs were building on and modifying the past models of commercial cinema.

While there was always a vibrant subset of American animation that involved experimentation, the studio system and then generic commercial-television norms shaped and eventually dominated mainstream practices. Early advocates for computer animation included John and James Whitney, who used computers to generate intricate visual patterns equivalent to precise musical compositions. After working in other media, John Whitney came to regard the computer as a new sort of cinematic piano, the ultimate instrument for visual research that helped him defy conventional representational codes (Russett and Starr 180). By 1971, John Whitney’s Matrix films exploited x, y, and z coordinates to explore three-dimensional space and complex series of visual harmonies. While this sort of avant-garde work proved incredibly influential with computer-graphics pioneers and spurred a whole new field of digital graphics for video logos, TV commercials, and games, its applications for mainstream narrative animation remained relatively tangential. With the acceleration of digital technologies by the 1980s and 1990s, many CGI applications were increasingly aimed at serving or mimicking the conventions of photographic realism and live-action cinema. While a rich array of experimental animation options exist within the wide, pervasive field of digital cinema, Suzanne Buchan explains that “CGI digital tools are enabling filmmakers to create a whole new experience of on-screen ‘realism’ that is increasingly gaining on photo-indexicality, until now the exclusive domain of photochemical celluloid” (2). Hyperrealism became a dominant goal of new digital developments.

Thus, theatrical cinema provided many of the fundamental models for new digital software, hardware, and their uses. As D. N. Rodowick observes, “Curiously, for an industry driven by innovation and market differentiation, the qualities of the ‘photographic’ and the ‘cinematic’ remain resolutely the touchstones for creative achievement in digital imaging entertainment” (101). Photographic and cinematic credibility, or what Stephen Prince labels “perceptual correspondence,” in the form of photorealism remained the guiding principle of many technological developments and their applications (Prince, “True Lies,” 36). As we will see, Pixar and Lasseter were driven to update existing cinematic-representational and narrative codes from the beginning. One of Lasseter’s lasting legacies is his ability to bridge the worlds of the Disney aesthetic and the digital realm. To a very real extent, the resulting hybrid cinema evident in films like Toy Story ends up taming the radical potential of 3D computer graphics. Disney’s Bambi proved more pertinent for their path than Whitney’s Matrix. Lasseter and Pixar struggled to fit within classical Hollywood cinema’s norms, forging new technological and industrial options that reinforced the conventions of past and contemporary film practice. Lasseter and Pixar’s significance for shaping and even focusing the direction of commercial computer animation, in its technical and narrative developments, cannot be overstated.

Almost everyone will agree that John Lasseter’s life story sounds as though it were fabricated by Pixar’s marketing department. Even Fortune magazine’s 2006 profile of Lasseter called it a “storybook life” that resembled “nothing so much as a Pixar plot line: Protagonist follows his heart, perseveres, gets the happy ending” (Schlender and Tkacyzk 140). However, it is worth noting that Lasseter, like all those Pixar protagonists, required valuable assistance from a community of equally fascinating groups and visionary individuals. Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith first laid the foundations for what would become Pixar Animation Studios, along with their friends and colleagues from the beginning, Ralph Guggenheim and David DiFrancesco. Both Catmull and Smith earned Ph.D.s before relentlessly pursuing their passion for combining computer graphics and animation into a viable new medium, eventually founding Pixar. Yet it is John Lasseter who has become the public face of Pixar. He is just as much an icon for Pixar as is Luxo Jr. Pixar as an institution has carefully controlled and shaped its image and its history, setting John Lasseter at its nucleus. Many of Lasseter’s biographical details and anecdotes have been carefully honed in publicity releases and interviews into a nearly seamless tale of daunting challenges, comical encounters, and amazing triumphs.

Like Walt Disney Studios before it, Pixar has helped make real-life events sound as if they were the stuff of myth and destiny. Routinely portrayed in casual poses, sporting Hawaiian shirts, and surrounded by toys and figures from his movies, Lasseter is consistently presented as a friendly, jovial fellow who, fortunately for all of us, never quite grew up. The parallels between the “creative geniuses” John Lasseter and Walt Disney are regularly emphasized in the popular press as well. For instance, prior to the release of A Bug’s Life in 1997, Wired already declared John Lasseter “the next Walt Disney” and one of the twenty-five most important people who were “bringing 21st-century Hollywood to life” (Daly, “Hollywood 2.0,” 201, 212). Even Steve Jobs often stated that “John Lasseter is the closest thing we have to Walt Disney today” (qtd. in Booth 100). Lasseter and Disney are typically presented as “fated” for their immense roles as the two most powerful figures in American animation. The Academy Awards reinforced their reputations, bestowing a string of Oscars on them and their studios. Beyond Disney and Lasseter’s famed monumental vision and success, there are indeed many similarities between these two renowned men. Lasseter even shares Disney’s passion for trains, installing one on his property. John Lasseter always looked up to Walt Disney as a role model and inspiration, even during an era when others were quite wary of Disney’s image and legacy. Yet, as we shall see, it took a great many industrial and cultural forces, as well as individual personality traits and skills, for Lasseter and his colleagues to build the Pixar style. Walt Disney’s road map was no longer adequate for the new marketplace and technological realities of Pixar’s era.

John Lasseter grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of Whittier, California, with a brother and twin sister. His mother, Jewell Lasseter, was a high-school art teacher who is said to have constantly supported and encouraged her children in the creative arts. His father, Paul Lasseter, was a parts manager for a Chevrolet dealership. As his biographer Jeff Lenburg explains, “Growing up, John learned to draw and take apart cars. He loved doing both. ‘Scratch one vein, and it’s Disney blood,’ he later said. ‘Scratch a second and it’s motor oil’” (12). John Lasseter has indeed been equally fascinated with animation and automobiles throughout his life. Eventually, Cars (2006) and Cars 2 (2011) resulted from merging these two passions. Already during his high-school years, Lasseter became nearly obsessed with animation, from Saturday-morning cartoons to Bugs Bunny TV shows after school. Early on he decided to become a professional animator. As he explains, “I was a freshman in high school and I had to do a book report. I was rummaging around in the Whittier High School library and I found this book called The Art of Animation by Bob Thomas. It dawned on me when I opened this book that people got paid to make cartoons. So I decided that’s what I wanted to do” (Lasseter, “Tribute”). He also saw The Sword in the Stone (dir. Wolfgang Reitherman, 1963) playing at a local revival movie house during high school and announced to his mother that he was going to work for Disney one day. Lasseter’s youthful ambition recalls that of François Truffaut and other impatient French New Wave directors who became resolved in their teens to open doors for themselves and get into the industry. Lasseter even began writing letters to Disney Studios, inserting examples of his drawings as evidence of his talent and determination.

Fortunately for John Lasseter, Ed Hansen, manager of the animation department at Disney, responded to the eager teenager’s correspondence. Hansen suggested that Lasseter pursue a solid art education to learn the fundamentals of figure drawing, design techniques, and color theory as preparation for eventually pursuing animation. Hansen even invited him to tour the studio. As Lasseter explains, “Then in my senior year I got a letter from Disney saying they were starting a Character Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts film school and that it would be taught by these artists from the heyday of Disney” (qtd. in Schlender and Tkacyzk 142). Lasseter submitted his portfolio and was the second person admitted into the cohort of twenty students for this new BFA pilot program in 1975. Moreover, he was offered a summer internship with the program’s director Jack Hannah. The unique opportunity to participate in a brand-new and flexible program within the venerable California Institute of the Arts provided a rich, collaborative experience for all involved. Among that initial class were Brad Bird and John Musker. Tim Burton was admitted the following year. They were all quite lucky to find one another in this time and place. Later, Lasseter acknowledged that “we probably learned as much from each other as we did from the teachers, just because we were all into it, and spent so much time together” (qtd. in Paik 32).

The CalArts Character Animation Program, which continues to this day, was begun by two famed veteran animators, Jack Hannah and T. (Thornton) Hee. Both men had worked at Disney since the 1930s and had experience in film and television. Moreover, Hannah and Hee becam...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• John Lasseter and the Rise of Pixar Style
• Interview with John Lasseter
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index