John Lasseter

• 1. Introduction

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  John Lasseter was fired from the Walt Disney Company for believing too hard in the future. The year was 1984, the project was a test film blending traditional hand-drawn animation with computer-generated backgrounds, and the men who fired him told him his employment was "now terminated" within minutes of hearing his pitch. He walked out of Disney Animation carrying an idea that the studio did not want, and into a career that would eventually change every animated film ever made after it.

  Lasseter was born on the 12th of January, 1957, in Los Angeles, the son of an art teacher and a Chevrolet parts manager, and he grew up in Whittier, California. He was a fraternal twin whose sister was born six minutes before him. He raced home from school to watch Chuck Jones cartoons on television. He read books about Disney animation as a teenager. Long before he ever held a camera, the shape of his obsession was already clear.

  The questions his story raises are not simply about movies. They are about what happens when one person's conviction runs ahead of an institution's willingness to follow. They are about the unlikely chain of events that turned a fired animator into the architect of Pixar, the man who oversaw five animated films each earning more than one billion dollars. And they are about what it means when a celebrated career ends under allegations that his colleagues had known about for years.

• 2. CalArts and the Foundation

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  Lasseter enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts as the second student ever accepted into the Character Animation program, a program created by Disney animators Jack Hannah and T. Hee. Jerry Rees was the first. The teachers included three members of Disney's legendary Nine Old Men team of veteran animators: Eric Larson, Frank Thomas, and Ollie Johnston. His classmates were Brad Bird, John Musker, Henry Selick, Tim Burton, and Chris Buck, a cohort that would go on to shape decades of American animation.

  He produced two student short films at CalArts, Lady and the Lamp in 1979 and Nitemare in 1980. Both won the student Academy Award for Animation.

  During summer breaks, Lasseter worked at Disneyland in Anaheim as a Jungle Cruise skipper, a job where he learned the fundamentals of comic timing by entertaining captive riders on the attraction. It was, by his own account, an education in performance. The studio had reviewed approximately ten thousand portfolios in the late 1970s searching for talent, selected around one hundred and fifty candidates as apprentices, and kept only about forty-five of them on permanently. Lasseter, whose Lady and the Lamp was already being noticed, was one of the forty-five.

• 3. The Idea That Got Him Fired

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  Between 1980 and 1981, Lasseter came across video tapes from one of the then new computer-graphics conferences showing the earliest experiments in computer animation. The images were mainly floating spheres, and he experienced them as a revelation. What crystallized the vision was a visit, while working on Mickey's Christmas Carol in 1983, to see the first light-cycle sequences for Tron. He saw in that footage what traditional animation had only dreamed of: three-dimensional depth.

  Lasseter and animator Glen Keane discussed making a feature film with computer-generated backgrounds and traditionally animated characters in the foreground. They chose a book, The Brave Little Toaster by Thomas Disch, as a candidate. First, they made a test using Where the Wild Things Are as a subject, partly because Disney had previously considered a Sendak adaptation. Executive Thomas L. Wilhite backed the project alongside them.

  The pitch was made to animation administrator Ed Hansen and Disney studios head Ron W. Miller. It was rejected on cost grounds. Within minutes of the meeting's end, Hansen called Lasseter into his office and told him his employment at Disney Animation was over. Wilhite, who had no formal obligation to the animation department, kept Lasseter working until the Wild Things test was finished in January 1984, but with the explicit understanding that there would be no further work for him there.

• 4. Lucasfilm and the Birth of CGI Character Animation

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  In November 1983, Lasseter attended a computer graphics conference at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, still in the final weeks of his Disney employment. There he spoke again with Ed Catmull, one of the key figures at the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group. Lasseter could not bring himself to tell Catmull he had been fired; he let Catmull assume he was simply between projects, as Hollywood studios routinely laid off animators during production gaps. Alvy Ray Smith, Catmull's colleague, heard about the conversation and told Catmull to put the phone down and hire Lasseter immediately.

  Lasseter joined the team for a week in December 1983, working on what became The Adventures of Andre and Wally B., their first computer-animated short film, designed to demonstrate that character animation was possible on a computer. He had assumed hand-drawn characters in CGI environments was the only viable approach. Catmull argued that fully computer-animated characters were possible too, just that no one had tried. In the final film, everything was computer-animated.

  He became a full-time Lucasfilm employee in October 1984, moving to the Bay Area. Working with Industrial Light and Magic on Young Sherlock Holmes, he produced the first fully computer-generated photorealistic animated character in a feature film: a knight assembled from stained-glass window elements. This was also the first CGI character to be scanned and painted onto film directly using a laser.

  George Lucas's financially costly divorce forced him to sell the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs purchased the division in 1986, and it became Pixar. Lasseter was among its founding employees.

• 5. Pixar and Toy Story

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  Pixar spent roughly a decade transforming from a computer hardware and software company into an animation studio. During that period, Lasseter directed short films that established the studio's technical and artistic range. Luxo Jr. in 1986, Tin Toy in 1988, and Knick Knack in 1989 were among them. Tin Toy won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Knick Knack was later selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time.

  Toy Story, released in 1995, was the culmination of the collaboration Catmull and Lasseter had begun with that December 1983 week at Lucasfilm. It was the first feature-length computer-animated film ever made. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Lasseter a Special Achievement Award for it, recognizing that no existing category quite fit what had been accomplished. The film was made on a budget of thirty million dollars and earned more than three hundred and seventy-four million dollars worldwide.

  Lasseter went on to direct A Bug's Life in 1998, Toy Story 2 in 1999, Cars in 2006, and Cars 2 in 2011. He executive-produced all other Pixar films through 2018. His works across directing and producing eventually grossed more than nineteen billion dollars, placing him among the most financially successful filmmakers in the history of the medium.

  His friendship with Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki shaped his taste throughout this period. He had been introduced to Miyazaki's work in 1981, when a TMS Entertainment delegation showed a clip from The Castle of Cagliostro at the Disney studio. In 1985, before he and Nancy were married, he insisted on showing clips of Miyazaki's work to her after dinner on the evening they met. He first traveled to Japan in 1987 and saw early drawings for My Neighbor Totoro. Totoro later appeared as a plush toy in Toy Story 3.

• 6. Return to Disney

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  In January 2006, Disney announced it was acquiring Pixar, and Lasseter became chief creative officer of both Pixar and Walt Disney Feature Animation, which he renamed Walt Disney Animation Studios. He also became principal creative adviser at Walt Disney Imagineering, contributing to the design of theme park attractions. He reported directly to Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger, bypassing the layers of studio and theme park executives between them. He also held green-light authority over films with Roy E. Disney's consent.

  In June 2007, Lasseter and Catmull were additionally given control of Disneytoon Studios, a division housed in a separate Glendale facility. They now supervised three distinct studios, each with its own production pipeline, spread across the Los Angeles area and the Bay Area. To manage the geography, they committed to spending at least two days per week, usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays, in Southern California.

  The results of this period are visible in the box office records. Toy Story 3 in 2010 became the first animated film to surpass one billion dollars in worldwide gross. Frozen in 2013 held the title of the highest-grossing animated film of all time until 2019 and finished its theatrical run as the fifth-highest-grossing film of any kind. Zootopia, Finding Dory, and Incredibles 2 each crossed one billion dollars as well, all executive-produced by Lasseter.

  In 2008, the Annie Awards honored him with the Winsor McCay Award for lifetime achievement in animation. In 2011, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6834 Hollywood Boulevard.

• 7. The Allegations and Departure

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  In November 2017, Lasseter took a six-month leave of absence after employees made allegations of sexual misconduct. The behavior described included grabbing, kissing, and comments about employees' physical attributes. According to Variety, it had been sufficiently well-known within Pixar that at various times the studio had assigned people whose role included reining in his behavior.

  In a memo to staff, Lasseter wrote: "It's been brought to my attention that I have made some of you feel disrespected or uncomfortable. That was never my intent. Collectively, you mean the world to me, and I deeply apologize if I have let you down." The memo said the misconduct had spanned a number of years.

  In June 2018, Disney and Lasseter announced jointly that he would leave the company when his contract expired at the end of the year. He moved to a consulting role in the interim.

  On the 9th of January, 2019, Skydance Media founder and CEO David Ellison hired Lasseter to head Skydance Animation, a division of Skydance Media formed in 2017. An investigation conducted before the hire found no previous claims of sexual assault, propositioning, or formal harassment filings, and no secret settlements. In his statement upon joining Skydance, Lasseter said he had spent a year in "deep reflection" and described the period as humbling. He serves there as producer on feature films and executive producer on series, alongside Ellison. The first film he produced at Skydance, Luck, was released in 2022.