John Lasseter really is as nice a guy as you see him on that 60 MINUTES II report about Pixar. He is also as enthusiastic, sincere and creative. I know because I have met him and talked with him. Unfortunately, John Lasseter doesn’t remember me.
John visited WDW property a few months ago to take a ride on the CAROUSEL OF PROGRESS because of the rumors that the attraction would soon be heading into the realm of extinct attractions. While John talked about his love of Disney history, his guide asked if he had ever met me since I do so many presentations about Disney history but John couldn’t recall ever talking with me.
John meets so many people that I am not the least bit offended. I am sure if he saw me in person he would remember because I look like a living cartoon. Also, if his guide had mentioned that I was working at the Disney Institute teaching traditional, computer and stop motion animation when he gave a presentation there, it also might have rung a bell for him.
John, who is known for wearing loud, colorful shirts, opened his presentation at the Disney Institute Cinema by asking if the audience in the back row could “hear” his shirt (parodying the old presenter’s opening line “Am I loud enough? Can those of you in the back hear me?”). Fortunately, I still have my notes from John’s very pleasant conversation with those of us who worked at the Disney Institute as well as my notes from his presentation. So, for those of you who did not attend, I am going to include some of those comments in today’s installment.
I still mentor many young hopeful computer animators who are always puzzled when they scan the guidelines for the Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) Training Program at Walt Disney Feature Animation and discover that they will participate in the same three phase program as the trainees in the Traditional Animation Program including life drawing classes and improvisational acting workshops.
The information packet sent to applicants interested in an entry level position in Disney’s CGI program includes the following paragraph:
“Keep in mind, the computer is not a substitute for any of the core skills mentioned here. Like a pencil, a brush or mountain of clay, the computer is a tool the artist will use to create his/her work. Creating art or animation on the computer requires that the mind control the form of the end product. Woodworkers say, ‘It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools’. Likewise, flawed design or concept is not saved simply by having been created on the computer. The goal for the student using the computer is to translate examples of his/her skill in art or animation into the digital medium.”
Even professional computer animators who have been successful in their career echo these sentiments. As early as 1991, computer animators like Craig Good who was working at PIXAR stated, “Think of the computer as a pencil. A big expensive pencil that uses electricity. Sometimes it takes several people to operate the pencil. The important point is that until it’s picked up by the hand of an artist, it’s as inert and useless as a pencil laying on a desk. Computer animation isn’t done by computers any more than clay animation is done by clay.”
Computer animation began in the Sixties with films like James Whitney’s CATALOGUE (1961) which made use of an analog computer. As computer animation evolved, it became a major tool for special effects from rotating logos in television commercials to imaginary landscapes in theatrical movies. (Let me also warn potential computer animators, that those people reviewing their reel hate seeing “flying metal” which is a phrase they use to describe a reel where objects are manipulated and moved but not animated. Animation is the illusion of life and makes use of the basic concepts from “slow in/slow out” to “stretch and squash” to “anticipation” to countless others that a good animation should understand.)
In my opinion, it was the genius of John Lasseter and his training as a traditional animator that has literally transformed the world of computer animation into more than just a bag of technological tricks. Just like Walt Disney before him, John knew that the audience’s amazement at new technology was fleeting but it’s affection for characters and personality animation is what has made even poorly animated films so memorable and cherished. I try to mentor students that it is not the constantly changing technology that is important but how you use that technology to tell timeless stories.
John attended California Institute of the Arts and studied with teachers like T. Hee, a legendary Disney storyman, and Jack Hannah, the director responsible for many of the classic Donald Duck shorts among other credits. He was steeped in the Disney principles of creating traditional animation which were the strong foundation for his revolutionary work later in computer animation. (Every time I interviewed Jack Hannah, he spoke proudly of having been one of John’s instructors. He really felt that John “got it” when it came to understanding animation.)
John won a student Academy Award for his film, NITEMARE, which chronicled the adventure of a little boy who discovers the truth behind the shadows and sounds that lurk in a little boy’s bedroom when the light is turned off. It is wonderfully paced, with a great sense of humor and a hilarious final visual punch line.
“Everyone else was doing their final project with lots of dialog so I took it as a challenge to do one without any dialog at all,” remembered John recently when I talked with him in Florida, “I was embarassed that it was just done in pencil and not in a more finished form but T. Hee told me it was not about finished animation or whether it was in color or not but it was about the strength of the story. That’s a lesson I remember when I am working with computer animation.”
One of my greatest disappointments is that this student short did not appear on the supplemental material with the MONSTERS INC. DVD. While John, like most artists, are uncomfortable by their early work, this short still held the audience’s attention at the Disney Institute, still brought howls of laughter and still brought loud applause despite John’s misgivings about its technical shortcomings.
Eventually, John joined the Disney Studio as a traditional animator and worked on such projects as MICKEY’S CHRISTMAS CAROL. It was during this time that he and Glen Keane saw the Disney film TRON and both of them got excited about the possiblities of computer animation. They worked together on a thirty second sample from Maurice Sendak’s WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.
John worked on the computer generated backgrounds while Glen did the character animation of the boy. They hoped to demonstrate to the Disney Studio not only the possibilites of using computers to aid in the telling of stories in animated features but also to suggest they could complete the Sendak project.
John was even able to convince his boss, Tom Wilhite, to take an option on a book entitled THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER as a possible feature. (When Wilhite left the studio and Disney was uninterested in the project, he took the option with him and made the feature film. John admits that it never occured to him to use computers to create the characters but felt that it was an excellent project for computer generated backgrounds.) Unfortunately, the Disney Studio determined that at that time computer animation was just too expensive to pursue aggressively.
Intrigued by the possiblities of computers, John left Disney and joined PIXAR. His first film was ANDRE AND WALLY B., a simple tale of a man annoyed by a bee. John was told to build characters based on geometric shapes and to have the film ready for SIGGRAPH, the computer convention, as a sample of what PIXAR could do.
“When it premiered at SIGGRAPH, I was totally unprepared for the response,” claimed John. “People loved the film but they kept asking me what software I was using and what programs I used and quite frankly, I was simply not well versed in all of that. They kept saying, ‘It is so funny. What did you use?’ and I realized they were so consumed with programs that it had not occured to them that the character personality and humor really came from traditional animation foundations.”
Every year after that, John’s main responsibility was preparing a special film for SIGGRAPH. LUXO JR., the story of a parent lamp and its child playing with a ball, was based on a lamp he had on his own desk. When John talks about the film, he doesn’t talk about the technology even though the film represents a breakthrough in the use of shadowing. John talks about handling the lamp and realizing that the base was so heavy that the character would have to prepare for a leap before leaping and that the baby lamp is not a miniature but a baby because “the rods grow longer before they grow out but the bulb is exactly the same size in each lamp because that doesn’t grow; you get that at a hardware store.” John assumes the parent lamp is a father rather than a mother because it allows Luxo Jr. to jump on the ball and a protective mother would stop that kind of activity. In short, when John talks about the film, he talks the same way a traditional hand drawn animator would analyze and describe his work.
LUXO JR. was followed by TIN TOY and KNICKKNACK and soon John was receiving Academy Awards for these computer animated shorts and he was still getting asked questions about programs and software rather than how he used them as effective tools in the telling of stories.
It was time to expand further and John started developing a feature length animated film in partnership with his old company, Disney. It was John’s original intent to use the toy from TIN TOY as the centerpiece for this ground breaking film. Eventually, the characters of Woody and Buzz, loosely based on John’s childhood toys, took over although even they went through a rapid evolution.
“We wanted to appeal to kids and adults and teenagers and Disney was very worried that because it was toys and we were calling it TOY STORY that it would just have kid appeal. How we got adult appeal was by making the toys be adults with adult concerns. Notice that they have a ‘staff meeting’ which is a very adult thing. And Mr. Spell had done a presentation on plastic corrosion. And you hear Mr. Spell and you realize how boring it must have been. And another thing, plastic does NOT corrode! We just put all these layers in the film so it appealed to several groups,” enthused John. “We definitely did not want to make it a typical Disney film with songs and the boy gets the girl. We wanted it to be a buddy film where two different people who may not even like each other are tossed together where they have to work together towards a common goal but by the end, the goal is no longer important. It is only important that you are together.”
Traditionally, animation has twenty-four frames for each second. In animation using a computer, it can escalate to thirty exposures for each second. On TOY STORY, it sometimes took sixty hours to render just one frame. “And sometimes we would go in after sixty hours and the things weren’t completely rendered because the computer was set up that at sixty hours it would shut down because there was obviously an error and it was running a continuous loop that needed to be stopped. So we had to change the computer,” emphasized John.
There were ten story artists on the original TOY STORY but almost twenty-five worked on the sequel. One of the storymen was Floyd Norman whose story career goes back to JUNGLE BOOK. Since that time, Floyd’s writing has graced a number of projects including several Disney feature films, the Mickey Mouse comic strip and the CD-ROM program DISNEY’S MAGIC ARTIST. (Floyd is deserving of several columns just about him. He is one of the nicest, most talented storyman/animator in the business and has always been generous with his praise for his co-workers.)
“John is very similar to Walt,” noted Floyd when I saw him a while ago. “He really ‘gets it’. They asked me to come over which was very flattering but I told them I really didn’t know much about computers. But you know what? I didn’t need to know about computers. You storyboard for a computer feature the same way you storyboard for a traditional feature. You ask the same questions about telling the story or if the gag is funny or if this action will help reveal the character.”
“We have made a really big mistake when we do these films,” admitted John. “Disney artists take these trips to China and Paris and all these exotic places for research and we devise films like TOY STORY that take place in a bedroom in Anytown, America or in the dirt like A BUG’S LIFE. However, I must admit that I did get to go to TOYS R US with the corporate credit card to buy all these toys for research. ‘Yeah, I think we need one of those and one of those’…”
John feels there are probably two strong career tracks today in animation. One emphasizes the computer but from the standpoint of modeling and design primarily. The other is that traditional grounding in the basic principles and philosophy of animation.
“When I was doing hand drawn animation, I often got frustrated and wrapped up with the individual drawing. I soon discovered that working with computers that some of that tedium is eliminated and I can concentrate more on the movement and animation and how it helps the story,” stated John.
John’s final word of advice for future computer animators emphasizes the importance of the same skills the great animation storytellers have used for the last century: “Using a computer to move an object around does not make me an animator any more than my buying a typewriter would make me a writer capable of authoring GONE WITH THE WIND.”
John has been described as the “Walt Disney of the Digital Age” and that is closer to the truth than many suspect. He certainly has the same boyish sense of wonder as Walt Disney and certainly the same strong sense of story. It doesn’t bother me that he doesn’t remember meeting me because he continues to inspire and entertain and I would much prefer him using a brain cell to continue doing that than use it to remember an encounter with me.