From Toy Story to The Incredibles and beyond, Disney/Pixar boss John Lasseter has helped to redefine animation. Donal O’Donoghue meets the man in the Cars 2 driving seat
When we meet, John Lasseter (54) is sporting a traffic-stopping Cars 2 shirt, one of the 365-plus Hawaiian shirts he has in his wardrobe. A cartoon geek and proud of it, the father of five boys is very much a kid at heart. He’s also, as boss man of the multi-billion Pixar/Disney animation studios, the most powerful cartoon man on the planet. He can wear any damn shirt he pleases.
Today, he is accompanied by Denise Ream, producer of Cars 2, who joined the company in 2006, just after the $7.4 billion deal that saw Pixar sold to Disney and Lasseter promoted to top dog. She hangs on his every word, who gets very animated about his two greatest loves, cartoons and cars. No surprise then that he has made Cars 2, his first time back in the director’s seat since Cars (2006).
Lasseter’s love of automobiles comes from his father, Paul, who died last May, not long after his 87th birthday. Paul Lasseter worked for Chevrolet dealerships for most of his life and toured with his son on the original Cars publicity junket. In one interview he said that the most amazing things about his son was that he ‘always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.’ Lasseter eyes tear up at the quote. “That’s cute”, he says and sighs.
Growing up in Whittier, California, Lasseter was jocosely referred to as the ‘bonus baby’, the unexpected twin born six minutes after his sister, Joanne. “Yep, I’m a twin and at that time in the Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles, I was told that it cost the same amount to have twins as it did to have one”, he says, and laughs. “So I was the free baby and my mom always called me ‘the bonus baby’.”
He then takes his father’s line – ‘the right place at the right time’ – and threads it through his career to chronicle a life of good fortune. “Firstly, I was blessed to have my soul put into the baby that was born to my mom and dad”, he says. “My mom was an art teacher and my dad worked for a car company. I thought that both of those things were cool. I also loved cartoons. Then I discovered that people actually make animation for a living. And my mom and dad were very supportive of me having an artistic, creative career. Now, to this day, when interviewers ask me for my advice for kids, I say ‘first thing is, kids go to your parents and say, being an animator is a fantastic real job’.”
He talks about his old schoolteachers (Mr Graves, Mrs McGill and so on) and how crucial they were in supporting his interest in art. He recalls how when he graduated from high school in 1979 – by then he had whizzed off umpteen letters to Disney Studios looking for a job – Disney had established an animation course at California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) that same year. He lists his influential teachers at Cal Arts, Disney greats like the legendary layout artist, Ken O’Connor, who worked on such classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Cinderella. “He said to us, in his dry Australian wit, ‘I don’t know how to teach, I’m just going to tell you what you need to know’. It was just so simple and so great.”
But Lasseter’s time at Disney ended badly when he was fired in 1984. Shortly afterwards, he was hired by the computer division of Lucasfilm, which became Pixar, but those early days at Disney taught some valuable lessons. “[At Disney] I was this young, inspired and excited animator who just wanted to do new things. But I was always being told ‘no! no! no! (he slaps the table for effect) that’s not how we do it.’ I was also told that there was a line of people outside who would love to take my place. And with a couple of sentences, those people made me not care about the studio or the project I was working on. I thought then, if I’m in ever in charge I’m never going to say that to a talented young person who just wants to make a movie better. I’m going to encourage them.”
For the first Cars movie, Lasseter’s wife, Nancy, advised him not make the movie for people like himself – that is car nuts. The phrase ‘the Nancy factor’ was thus coined and Cars 2 continues the tradition. “The fact is, this really is a spy movie with cars in it”, he says. “But the approach of the whole movie was story, character exclusively and then we take a step back and then say, ‘now they’re cars.’ Sometimes you have to adjust the story slightly because one character can’t do this . . . (he hands me a piece of paper and then says into my recorder ‘I just handed a piece of paper to him so that when you listen back you’ll know what I’m talking about!)’”
Cars 2 is not just about Lasseter’s passion for cars and spy shows (The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a childhood favourite): it is also a tribute to his late father, who got to see some of the film before his passing. “In fact that really cool, angled combat ship at the beginning of the movie came, in a way, from my dad”, he says. “He was in the US Navy during WWII and he came to me one day and popped down this photograph of a new navy ship. It was so different looking and I thought ‘that is so cool!’ So he and I got on the internet and we were looking at pictures of this. Then, as we were developing Cars 2, I brought in these pictures of the ship that my old man turned me onto. So the movie has a bit of his influence.”
Cars 2 is now showing nationwide.
