The Wizard Of Pixar

By Cathy Booth/Sonoma

John Lasseter arrives for his interview in a big red bug with metal eyelashes. "Come see my bug!" he yells, grinning and waving from down the street. Wine connoisseurs in town to tour Sonoma's vineyards turn to stare. Kids point and giggle. The "bug" turns out to be a Volkswagen painted as a lady bug to promote the Oscar-winning director's other "bug"--Pixar's computer-animated film A Bug's Life. Lasseter's tale of greedy grasshoppers and anxious ants broke the Thanksgiving holiday box-office records with $45.7 million in ticket sales and slaughtered its main competitor, Babe: Pig in the City. Hollywood, skeptical before the release, took note. BUGS LEAVE BACON ACHIN', Daily Variety snorted merrily.

Boasts Steve Jobs, Pixar's CEO and Lasseter's understandably proud boss: "John Lasseter is the closest thing we have to Walt Disney today." Could be. Toy Story, Lasseter's first computer-animated feature, released in 1995, has reaped an estimated $1 billion for Pixar and its production-partner Disney in box-office, video and licensing revenues. But more important, Disney is betting that its heroes Buzz and Woody will endure for generations of kids to come. Says Peter Schneider, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation: "Look at Walt Disney's legacy: he told great stories, with great characters, and he pushed the boundaries of animation. With Toy Story and A Bug's Life, Lasseter has astounded us twice."

So who is this guy John Lasseter? At 41, with a chubby face and round wire-rimmed glasses, he looks like the overgrown kid he is at heart. He's just silly enough to ride a motorized hot dog to a Hollywood premiere. His offices at Pixar's animation studios in Point Richmond, outside San Francisco, are host to a veritable convention of Buzz and Woody toys: Mech Warrior Buzz, Space Sheriff Woody, Space Claw Buzz, Snake Whippin' Woody. They're not just props: Lasseter checks each toy tied in to Pixar's films. "He plays as hard as he works," laughs Lasseter's co-director, Andrew Stanton.

As collaborative as animated movies are (some 60 animators worked on A Bug's Life, for instance), Stanton says it is Lasseter's sensibility that pervades both Toy Story and A Bug's Life. "He truly gets it. He has both the kid's perspective and the filmmaker's perspective. The childlike charm and the maturity, that's John." The payoff is that animation, long considered a kiddie medium, is attracting adults. Some 35% of the Bug's Life audience on the Friday after Thanksgiving were teens or adults--without kids in tow.

Born in Hollywood (but reared in Whittier, Ca., Richard Nixon's hometown), Lasseter decided to pursue animation after his mother, an art teacher, gave him a book about animation. "I realized people made cartoons for a living!" he says. One of the first eight students in Disney's animation program at California Institute of the Arts (Tim Burton was a classmate), Lasseter went on to work for Disney after graduation in 1979.

By the early '80s, however, Disney's animation efforts were looking tired. When Lasseter saw Disney's Tron in development in 1981, with its three-dimensional computer world, he also saw the future. But Disney seemed interested in computers only if they saved money--which they don't. Frustrated, he left to work for George Lucas' special-effects house just as Return of the Jedi came out in 1983. There he developed computer skills that created dazzling effects for movies that were mainly duds. "You'd kill yourself on effects, but no one remembered the films," says Lasseter.

It was a valuable lesson that he brought to Pixar when Jobs acquired the company in 1986. Pixar has since grown from six employees to 400, won 12 Academy Awards, including two for Lasseter himself. While justifiably proud of Pixar's RenderMan technology, which he helped develop and which has helped Hollywood create effects like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, Lasseter is a traditionally trained animator at heart (who lets the whiz kids handle the techno demands of the films). But Lasseter, who is now producing Toy Story 2 for next Thanksgiving, says he has never forgotten that "building great character is the most important thing in the movies. We know someday the technology will be far beyond Toy Story and Bug's Life. But three years after Toy Story, Buzz and Woody live on in people's minds. And that's what we want--movies that live on."