John Lasseter Quotes

Author Image

John Lasseter

Profession : Director

Birth : January 12, 1957

When I started work with LucasArts Computer Division back in 1984, I went to the Palace of Fine Arts and saw the Festival of Animation for the first time. I loved the diverse collection of animated films the festival held.

John Lasseter

Animation is the one type of movie that really does play for the entire audience. Our challenge is to make stories that connect for kids and adults.

John Lasseter

I was mentored by great Disney animators at the end of their careers.

John Lasseter

I'm a car nut. My father was a parts manager at a Chevrolet dealership.

John Lasseter

You cannot base a whole movie on just the imagery alone. It has to be the story and the characters.

John Lasseter

Everything I do and everything Pixar does is based on a simple rule: Quality is the best business plan, period.

John Lasseter

We make the kind of movies we like to watch. I love to laugh. I love to be amazed by how beautiful it is. But I also love to be moved to tears. There's lots of heart in our films.

John Lasseter

I realized that people make cartoons for a living. It had never dawned on me that you could do this as a career.

John Lasseter

To me, I would much rather be part of a healthy industry than being the only player in a dead industry.

John Lasseter

'Bolt' was made by Walt Disney Animation Studios, not by Pixar.

John Lasseter

Pixar's short films convinced Disney that if the company could produce memorable characters within five minutes, then the confidence was there in creating a feature film with those abilities in story and character development.

John Lasseter

Walt Disney had always tried to get more dimension in his animation and when I saw these tapes, I thought, This is it! This is what Walt was waiting for! But when I looked around, nobody at the studio at the time was even halfway interested in it.

John Lasseter

I quickly realized that this medium had a lot to offer someone like me. To do Disney-quality hand-drawn cartoons, you have to be a master of two art forms. Seriously, you have to be able to draw like a Leonardo da Vinci or a Michelangelo. But also you have to know movement and timing and control that through 24 frames a second.

John Lasseter

Sure, they were simple desk lamps with only a minimal amount of movement, but you could immediately tell that Luxo Jr. was a baby, and that the big one was his mother. In that short little film, computer animation went from a novelty to a serious tool for filmmaking.

John Lasseter

Never in the history of cinema has a medium entertained an audience. It's what you do with the medium.

John Lasseter

I believe in the nobility of entertaining people and I take great, great pride that people are willing to give me two or three hours of their busy lives.

John Lasseter

I believe in research you cannot do enough research; believability comes out of what's real.

John Lasseter

I do what I do because of Walt Disney. Goofy. Mickey Mouse. I never forgot how their films entertained me.

John Lasseter

What I love about Goofy is the flesh on his cheeks. You can almost feel it.

John Lasseter

It's the nature of Hollywood that there are the people in power and the people who tell them what they want them to hear.

John Lasseter